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SOCIALISM 

A SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF 
SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES 



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SOCIALISM 



A SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF 
SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES 



BY 



JOHN SPARGO 



AUTHOR OF "THE BITTER CRY OF THE CHILDREN," 

" THE SOCIALISTS, WHO THEY ARE AND 

WHAT THEY STAND FOR," ETC. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1906 

All rights reserved 






c 



LIE<RARY of CONGRF.SS 

Two CopiP.^ Rpr.pived 

JUN 26 1906 



Copyright, 1906, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1906. 



XortoootJ $rrs8 

J. S. Cushing ft Co. — Berwick ft Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



&0 

GEOEGE D. HEEEON 

" With two forms and ivith tivo figures, 
but ivith one soul, thou and J." 

JATjALU-DDIN RlJMI 



PREFACE 

Is an apology needed for adding to the number 
of books devoted to the exposition of modern So- 
cialism? I hardly think so. If the reader will 
carefully examine the bibliographies, he will find 
that, with the exception of those books issued 
directly through the established agencies of the 
Socialist propaganda, there is hardly a single book 
devoted to the exposition of Socialism, wholly affirma- 
tive in tone and written frankly from the standpoint 
of a convinced Socialist. Hence, almost all the 
books on the subject issued through the ordinary 
channels are apologetic and lacking in conviction. 
Not only so, but they are generally unsatisfactory 
to the Socialist for the additional reason that their 
authors have failed to understand the spiritual, 
dynamic forces of the modern Socialist movement. 

This little volume is wholly unpretentious in its 
aim. Its purpose is to state in popular language 
what Socialism really means and what it does not 
mean. It is intended to be an introduction merely 
to a great and profoundly impressive subject of 
growing international interest and importance. Dur- 
ing many years spent in the propaganda of Socialism 



in two continents, the need of such a volume has 
been deeply impressed upon my mind; hence this 
attempt to meet the necessity. 

During twelve years spent in the earnest propa- 
ganda of Socialism by voice and pen, particularly 
as a lecturer to all classes of audiences in various 
lands, I have had exceptional opportunities for know- 
ing the nature of the difficulties which most serious- 
minded, intelligent men and women encounter when 
they begin to consider Socialism. I have felt it 
incumbent upon me to face these difficulties with 
the utmost frankness and sincerity, and I have 
written this little volume in that spirit. I have 
tried to be as frank with the reader as I am with 
my own soul, realizing that 

"Men in earnest have no time to waste 
Patching fig leaves for the naked truth." 

The method of treating the subject, somewhat 
different from the methods commonly employed by 
Socialist writers, is a result of that same fund of 
experience. I have adopted the method of presenta- 
tion which I have found to be most effective in my 
work as a lecturer. If the critical reader finds 
portions of the book somewhat discursive, owing to 
the weaving-in of much biographical matter relating 
to Owen, Marx, and others, I venture to hope that 
the gain in human interest will atone for an other- 
wise inexcusable failing. Be that how it may, I 



PREFACE IX 

purposely chose to write in the spirit of frank and 
earnest conversation, as friend to friend, rather than 
in the spirit and language of academic thought. 

While in the main I believe that this statement 
of their principles will be acceptable to the vast 
majority of Socialists, in this country and abroad, 
it is only fair that I should warn the reader against 
holding the Socialist movement in general, and the 
Socialist party in particular, responsible for my 
personal views. Throughout the text I have tried 
to preserve a clear distinction between those views 
which are universally accepted by Socialists and 
those which are largely personal. In the chapter 
entitled Outlines of the Socialist State, I have tried 
to lay down certain fundamental principles which, 
it seems to me, must characterize the Socialist regime 
and which are involved in modern Socialism. I 
believe that, in the main, these principles will be 
accepted by the vast majority of my fellow- Socialists 
throughout the world, and that they will welcome 
most of all the effort made to show that the Socialist 
regime involves no rule by a great bureaucracy, no 
crushing out of individual liberties, none of that 
repression of genius which Herbert Spencer and 
others, down to the crude romancer of The Scarlet 
Umpire, have imagined and decried. At the same 
time, I must accept personal responsibility for the 
attempt made in this chapter to state Socialism con- 
structively without Utopian romanticism. 



X PREFACE 

If this little book leads to a juster view of Social- 
ism and the Socialist movement ; if it succeeds in 
inducing men and women to study the subject with 
calm reason; if, finally, it results in enlightening 
the opponents of Socialism so that they abandon 
their quixotic tasks of tilting at windmills, attacking 
a Socialism which has no existence outside of their 
imaginations, to devote their efforts to serious and 
candid discussion of the issues involved, I shall be 
amply repaid for the labor of writing it. 

JOHN SPARGO. 
Prospect House, Yonkers, N.Y., 
May, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PREFACE vii 

CHAPTER I 

Introduction 

Changed attitude of the public mind toward Socialism — 
Growth of the movement responsible for the change — 
Unanimity of friends and foes concerning the future 
triumph of Socialism — Herbert Spencer's belief and its 
awful pessimism — Study of Socialism a civic duty — No- 
bility of the word "Socialism" — Its first use — Confu- 
sion arising from its indiscriminate use — "Socialism" 
and "Communism" in the Communist Manifesto — Un- 
fair tactics of opponents — Engels on the significance of 
the word in 1847 — Its present significance . . . 1-13 

CHAPTER II 
Robert Owen and the Utopian Spirit 

Utopian Socialism and Robert Owen — Estimates of Owen by 
Liebknecht and Engels — His early life — Becomes a 
manufacturer — The industrial revolution in England — 
Misery caused by the introduction of machinery — ' ' Lud- 
dite" riots against machinery — Early revolts against 
machinery — Marx's views — Owen as manufacturer — 
As social reformer — The New Lanark experiment — He 
becomes a Socialist — Failure of his communistic colonies 
— Owen compared with Saint- Sim on and Fourier . 14-45 



Xll CONTENTS 



CHAPTER III 
The "Communist Manifesto" and the Utopian Spirit 

PAGE 

The Communist Manifesto — Conditions in 1848 when it was 
written — Communism of the working class — Weitling 
and Cabet — Marx and Engels — The Manifesto as the 
first international declaration of a working-class move- 
ment — Literary merit of the Manifesto — Its fundamental 
proposition stated by Engels — Socialism becomes a sci- 
ence — The authorship of the Manifesto — Engels' testi- 
mony 46-63 



CHAPTER IV 
The Materialistic Conception of History 

Socialism a theory of social evolution — Not economic fatalism 

— Leibnitz and the savage — Ideas and progress — Value 
of the materialistic conception of history — Eoreshadow- 
ings of the theory — What is meant by the term " mate- 
rialistic conception" — Results of overemphasis : Engels' 
confession — Limits of the theory — The doctrine of free 
will — Darwin and Marx — Application of the theory, 
specific and general — Columbus and the discovery of 
America — General view of historical progress — Antiq uity 
of communism — Cooperation and competition — Slavery 

— Serfdom — Class struggles — The rise of capitalism and 

the wage-labor system 64-96 

CHAPTER V 

Capitalism and the Law of Concentration 

A new form of class division arises in the first stage of capital- 
ism — The second stage of capitalism begins with the 
great mechanical inventions — The development of for- 
eign and colonial trade — Theoretic individualism and 
practical collectivism — The law of capitalist concentra- 
tion formulated by Marx — Competition, monopoly, 



CONTENTS Xm 

PAGE 

socialization — Trustification, interindustrial and inter- 
national — Criticisms of the Marxian theory — The small 
producers and traders — Concentration in agriculture — 
Failure of the bonanza farms — Other modes of concen- 
tration — Farm ownership and farm mortgages — The 
factory and the farm — The concentration of wealth — 
European statistics — Dr. Spahr's estimate of the distribu- 
tion of wealth in the United States — General summary 97-122 

CHAPTER VI 

The Class Struggle 

Opposition to the doctrine — Misrepresentations by the oppo- 
nents of Socialism — Socialists not the creators of the 
class struggle — Antiquity of class struggles — The theory 
as stated in the Communist Manifesto —Fundamental 
propositions in the statement — Slavery the first system 
of class division in history — Class divisions in feudalism 
— Rise of the capitalist class and its triumph — Main 
class divisions of capitalist society — Inherent antagonism 
of interests between employer and employee — Common- 
ality of general interests and antagonism of special class 
interests — Individuals versus classes — Vague and vacil- 
lating interests of the middle class — Class interests as 
they affect thoughts, opinions, and beliefs — Varying 
ethical standards of economic classes — Denials of class 
divisions in America to-day — Our " untitled nobility " — 
Class divisions real though not legally established — They 
tend to become fixed and hereditary — Consciousness of 
class divisions new in America — Transition from class 
to class becoming increasingly difficult — No hatred of 
individuals involved in the theory — Socialism versus 
Anarchism — The labor struggle in the United States — 
Organized labor and organized capital — Not due to mis- 
understandings, but to antagonism of interests — The 
reason for trades unionism — Trades union methods — 
Limitations of trades union powers — Government and the 
workers — The call for the political organization of the 



CONTENTS 



workers — Anti-labor laws — Capitalistic use of police 
and military — Judicial injunctions — " Taff Vale law" 

— Political rising of the workers in England — Triumph 
of the workers will end class rule and liberate all man- 
kind 123-160 

CHAPTER VII 

Karl Marx and the Economics of Socialism 

First comprehensive statement of the materialistic conception 
of history by Marx — La Misere de la Philosophic, a 
critique of Proudhon — Marx's first essay in economic 
science — His frank recognition of the Ricardians — Marx 
in England becomes familiar with the Ricardians from 
whom he is accused of " pillaging " his ideas — Criticisms 
of Menger and others — Marx expelled from Germany 
and France — His removal to London — His struggle with 
poverty — Domestic relations — Capital an English work 
in all essentials — The Ricardians and their precursors — 
Superior method and insight of Marx — The sociological 
viewpoint in economics — "Scientific Socialism," criti- 
cisms of the term — Its justification . . . . 161-181 

CHAPTER Vin 

Outlines of the Economics of Socialism 

The sociological principle pervades all the work of Marx — 
Commodities defined — Use values and economic values 

— Exchange of commodities through the medium of 
money — The labor theory of value in its crude form — 
•Some notable statements by the classic economists — 
Marx and Benjamin Franklin — Scientific development of 
the labor theory of value by Marx — Price and value — 
Money as a price-expression and as a commodity — The 
theory of supply and demand as determinants of value — 
The "Austrian" theory of final utility as the determi- 
nant of value — English origin of the theory — Its identity 



CONTENTS XV 



with the supply and demand theory — Labor-power as a 
commodity — Wages, its price, determined as the prices 
of all other commodities are — Wherein labor-power 
differs from all other commodities — The law of surplus 
value — Why Marx used the term "Surplus Value" — 
The theory stated — The division of surplus value — 
Other theories of the source of capitalist income — 
Wherein they fail to solve the problem — Fundamental 
importance of the Marxian doctrine to the Socialist move- 
ment 182-210 

CHAPTER IX 

Outlines of the Socialist State 

Detailed specifications of the Socialist regime impossible — 
Principles which must characterize it — Man's egoism 
and sociability — Duality of motives and social progress 

— The idea of the Socialist state as a huge bureaucracy 

— Mr. Anstey's picture and Herbert Spencer's fear — 
Justification of this view in the propaganda of Socialist 
Utopia-builders — The Socialist ideal of individual liberty 

— Absolute individual liberty an impossibility — Politi- 
cally, the organization of the Socialist regime must be 
democratic — Automatic democracy unattainable — The 
need of eternal vigilance — The rights of the individual 
and of society briefly stated — Private property and in- 
dustry not incompatible with modern Socialism — The 
economic structure of Socialism — Efficiency the test for 
private or collective industry — The application of demo- 
cratic principles to industry — The right to labor guaran- 
teed by society, and the duty to labor enforced by 
society — Eree choice of labor — Methods of remunera- 
tion — Who will do the dirty work? — The "abolition 
of wages" — The inheritance of property in the Socialist 
regime — The security of society against the improvidence 
of its members — The administration of justice — Educa- 
tion completely free — The question of religious educa- 
tion — The state as protector of the rights of the child — 



XVI CONTENTS 

PAGE 

No hostility to religion, but strict neutrality — A maxi- 
mum of personal liberty with a minimum of restraint the 
Socialist ideal 211-239 

APPENDIX 

National Platform of the Socialist party of America . 241-250 
INDEX 251-257 



SOCIALISM 

SUMMAEY AND INTERPRETATION OF 
SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES 



SOCIALISM 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 
I 

Time was, and not so very long ago, when the 
kindest conception of Socialism held by the aver- 
age man was that of the once familiar and cynical 
doggerel : — 

" What is a Socialist ? One who is willing 
To give up his penny and pocket your shilling." x 

There was another view, more brutally unkind, that 
of the blood-curdling cartoon representing the poor 
Socialist as a bomb-laden assassin. Both these views 
are now, happily, well-nigh extinct. Great as the 
ignorance of people concerning Socialism still is, 
we have progressed so far that neither of these puerile 
misrepresentations are commonly met with. It is 
true that in the newspapers Socialists are sometimes 
classed with Anarchists, — especially in times of 
public excitement against the Anarchists, — and that 

1 By Ebenezer Elliott, the " Corn-Law Rhymer." 

B \ 



2 SOCIALISM 

we are not infrequently asked about our supposed 
intentions of having a great general "dividing-up 
day" for the equal distribution of all the wealth of 
the nation. Still, it is the exception rather than 
the rule to encounter these criticisms, and they do 
not represent the attitude of the mass of people 
toward the Socialist movement. 

The reason for the changed attitude of the public 
toward the Socialist movement and the Socialist 
ideal, will, I think, be found in the growth of the 
Socialist movement itself. There are many who 
would change the order of this proposition and say 
that the growth of the Socialist movement is a result 
of the changed attitude of the public mind toward 
it. In a sense, both views are right. Obviously, if 
the public mind had not revised its judgments some- 
what, we should not have attained our present strength 
and development; but it is equally obvious that if 
we had not grown, if we had still remained the small 
and feeble body we once were, the public mind would 
not have revised its judgments much, if at all. We 
should still have been regarded as advocates of the 

"Equal division of unequal earnings/' 

ready to enforce our sordidly selfish demands by the 
assassin's cowardly weapons. It is easy to misrepre- 
sent and to vilify a small body of men and women 
when they possess no powerful influence. 



INTRODUCTION 6 

But it is otherwise when that small body has grown 
into a great body with far-reaching influence. So 
long as the Socialist movement in America consisted 
of a few poor workingmen in two or three of the largest 
cities, most of them foreigners, it was very easy for 
the average man to accept the views expressed in the 
ferocious, blood-curdling cartoon and the sneering 
distich of the poet's satirical fancy. But when the 
movement grew, and, instead of a few helpless for- 
eigners, embraced nearly half a million voters, in 
all parts of the United States, it became a different 
matter. It is manifestly impossible for a great world- 
wide movement, numbering its adherents by the 
million, and having for its advocates many of the 
foremost thinkers, artists, and poets of the world, 
to be based upon either sordid selfishness or mur- 
derous hate. If that were true, if it were possible 
for such a thing to be true, the most gloomy forbod- 
ings of the pessimist would fall far short of the real 
measure of Humanity's impending doom. 

Still, the word " Socialism" is spoken by many 
with the pallid lips of fear, the scowl of hate, or the 
amused shrug of contempt; while in the same land, 
people of the same race, facing the same problems 
and perils, speak it with gladdened voices and hope- 
lit eyes. Many a mother crooning over her babe 
prays that it may be saved from the Socialism to 
which another, with equal mother-love, looks as her 



4 SOCIALISM 

child's heritage and hope. And with scholars and 
statesmen it is much the same. With wonderful 
unanimity, agreeing that, in the words of Herbert 
Spencer, " Socialism will come inevitably in spite 
of all opposition," they yet differ quite as much in 
their estimates of its character and probable effects 
upon the race as the most unlearned. One welcomes 
and another fears ; one envies the unborn generations, 
another pities. To one the coming of Socialism 
means the coming of Human Brotherhood, the long, 
long quest of Humanity's choicest spirits; while to 
another it means the enslavement of the world through 
fear. 

Many years ago Mr. Herbert Spencer wrote an 
article on The Coming Slavery, the whole tone of 
which conveyed the impression that the great thinker 
saw what he thought to be signs of the inevitable 
triumph of Socialism. All over the world Socialists 
were cheered by this admission from their implacable 
enemy. In this connection the following incident 
is worth noticing: In October, 1905, a well-known 
Frenchman, M. G. Davenay, visited Mr. Spencer 
and had a long conversation with him on several 
subjects, among them, Socialism. A few days after 
his return, he received a letter on the subject from 
Mr. Spencer, written in French, which was published 
in the Paris Figaro a few days after Mr. Spencer's 
death, in December, 1905, two months or thereabouts 



INTRODUCTION 5 

from the time of the interview which called it forth. 1 
After some brief reference to his health, Mr. Spencer 
wrote: "The opinions I have delivered here before 
you, and which you have the liberty to publish, are 
briefly these: (1) Socialism will triumph inevitably, 
in spite of all opposition; (2) its establishment will 
be the greatest disaster which the world has ever 
known; (3) sooner or later, it will be brought to an 
end by a military despotism." 

Anything more awful than this black pessimism 
which clouded the life of the great thinker, it would 
be difficult to imagine. After living his long life 
of splendid service in the interest of progress, and 
studying as few men have ever done the history of 
the race, he went down to his grave fully believing 
that the world was doomed to inevitable disaster. 
How different from the confidence of the poet, 2 
foretelling — 

"A wonderful day a-coming when all shall be better than 
well." 

The last words of the great French Utopist, Saint- 
Simon, were, "The future is ours!" And thousands 
of times his words have been reechoed by those 
who, believing equally with Herbert Spencer that 
Socialism must come, see in the prospect only the 

1 I quote the English translation from the London Clarion, Decem- 
ber 18, 1905. 

2 William Morris. 



6 SOCIALISM 

fulfillment of the age-long dream of Human Brother- 
hood. Men as profound as Spencer, and as sincere, 
rejoice at the very thing which blanched his cheeks 
and filled his heart with fear. 

There is, then, a widespread conviction that So- 
cialism will come and, in coming, vitally affect for 
good or ill every life. Millions of earnest men and 
women have enlisted themselves beneath its ban- 
ner in various lands, and their number is con- 
stantly growing. In this country, as in Europe, 
the growth of Socialism is one of the most evident 
facts of the age, and its study is therefore most im- 
portant. What does it mean, and what does it 
promise or threaten, are questions which civic 
duty prompts. The day is not far distant when 
ignorance of Socialism will be regarded as a dis- 
grace, and neglect of it a civic wrong. For no man 
can faithfully discharge the responsibilities of his 
citizenship until he is able to give an answer to these 
questions. 

II 

The word " Socialism " is admittedly one of the 
noblest and most inspiring words ever born of human 
speech. Whatever may be thought of the prin- 
ciples it represents, or of the political parties which 
contend for it, no one can dispute the beauty and 
moral grandeur of the word itself. Derived from 



INTRODUCTION 7 

the Latin word Socius, meaning a comrade, it is, 
like the word " mother," for instance, one of those 
great universal speech symbols which find their way 
into every language. Signifying as it does faith in 
the comradeship of man as the proper basis of social 
life, prefiguring a social state in which there shall be 
no strife of man against man, or nation against nation, 
it is a verbal expression of man's loftiest aspirations 
crystallized into a single word. The old Hebrew 
Prophet's dream of a word-righteousness that shall 
give peace, when nations "shall beat their swords into 
plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks," 1 
and the Angel-song of Peace and Goodwill in the leg- 
ends of the Nativity, mean no more. Plato, spiritual 
son of Socrates who for truth's sake drained the hem- 
lock cup to its dregs, dreamed of such social peace 
and unity, and the line of those whose eyes have 
seen the same glorious vision of a love-welded world 
has never been broken, — More and Campanella, 
Saint-Simon and Owen, Marx and Engels, Morris 
and Bellamy, and the end of the prophetic line is 
not yet. 

But if the dream, the hope itself, is old, the word 
which expresses the hope is new. It is hard to realize 
that the word which means so much to countless 
millions of human beings, in every civilized country 
of the world, is no older than some of those whose 

1 Isaiah ii. 4. 



8 SOCIALISM 

lips speak it with reverence and hope. Because it 
will help us to a clearer understanding of modern 
Socialism, and because too it is little known, notwith- 
standing its intensely interesting character, let us 
linger awhile over that page of history which re- 
cords the origin of this noble word. 

Some years ago, anxious to settle, if possible, the 
vexed question of the origin and first use of the word 
" Socialism" I devoted a good deal of time to an inves- 
tigation of the subject, spending much of it in a care- 
ful survey of all the early nineteenth-century radical 
literature. I early found that the generally ac- 
cepted account of its introduction, by the French 
writer, L. Reybaud, in 1840, was wrong. Indeed, 
when once started on the investigation, it seemed 
rather surprising that the account should have been 
accepted, practically without challenge, for so long. 
Finally I concluded that an anonymous writer in 
an English paper was the first to use the word, the 
date being August 24, 1835. 1 Since that time an 
investigation of a commendably thorough nature 
has been made by three students of the University 
of Wisconsin, 2 with the result that they have been 
unable to find any earlier use of the word. It is 
somewhat disappointing that after thus tracing 



1 See Socialism and Social Democracy, by the present writer. 
The Comrade, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1903. 

2 In The International Socialist Review, Vol. VI, No. 1, July, 1905. 



INTRODUCTION 9 

the word back to what may well be its first appear- 
ance in print, it should be impossible to identify its 
creator. 

The letter in which the term is first used is signed 
"A Socialist/' and it is quite evident that the writer 
uses it as a synonym for the commonly used term 
"Owenite," by which the disciples of Robert Owen 
were known. I think it is most probable that Owen 
himself had used the word, and, to some extent, 
made it popular; and that the writer had heard 
"Our Dear Social Father," as Owen was called, use 
it, either in some of his speeches or in conversation. 
At any rate, one of Owen's associates, now dead, told 
me some years ago that Owen often specifically 
claimed to have used the word at least ten years 
before it was adopted by any other writer. 

The word gradually became more familiar in 
England. Throughout the years 1835-1836, in the 
pages of Owen's paper, The New Moral World, there 
are many instances of the word occurring. The 
French writer, Reybaud, in his Reformateurs Mo- 
dernes, published in 1840, made the term equally 
famihar to the reading public of Continental Europe. 
By him it was used to designate not merely Owen 
and his followers, but all social reformers and vision- 
aries, — Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, 
and others. By an easy transition, it soon came 
into general use as designating all altruistic visions, 



10 SOCIALISM 

theories, and experiments, from the Republic of Plato 
onward through the centuries. 

In this way much confusion arose. The word be- 
came too indefinite and vague to be distinctive. It 
was applied indiscriminately to persons of widely 
differing, and often conflicting, views. Every one 
who complained of social inequalities, every dreamer 
of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The en- 
thusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith 
and practices of primitive Christianity, and the 
aggressive Atheist, proclaiming religion to be the 
bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State-wor- 
shipper, who would extol Law, and spread the net 
of government over the whole of life, and the icono- 
clastic Anarchist, who would destroy all forms of 
social authority, have all alike been dubbed Socialists, 
by their friends no less than by their opponents. 

The confusion thus introduced has had the effect 
of seriously complicating the study of Socialism from 
the historical point of view. Thus the Socialists of 
the present day, who do not advocate Communism, 
have always regarded as a classic presentation of 
their views, the famous pamphlet by Karl Marx and 
Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto. They 
have circulated it by millions of copies in practi- 
cally all the languages of the civilized world. Yet 
throughout it speaks of "Socialists" with ill-con- 
cealed disdain, and always in favor of Communism 



INTRODUCTION 11 

and the Communist Party. The reason for this is 
clearly explained by Engels himself in the preface 
written by him for the English edition, but that has 
not sufficed to prevent misconception in many cases; 
nor has it prevented many an unscrupulous opponent 
of Socialism from quoting the Communist Manifesto 
of Marx and Engels against the Socialists of the 
Marx-Engels school. 1 In like manner, the utterances 
and ideas of many of those who formerly called them- 
selves Socialists have been quoted against the mod- 
ern Socialists, notwithstanding the fact that it was 
precisely on account of their desire to repudiate all 
connection with, and responsibility for, such ideas 
that the founders of the modern Socialist movement 
took the name Communists. 

Nothing could well be clearer than the language in 
which Engels explains why the name Communist was 
chosen, and the name Socialist discarded. He says : 2 
" Yet, when it (the Manifesto) was written, we could 
not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Social- 
ists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the 
adherents of the various Utopian systems : Owenites 

1 As an instance of this I note the following recent example : 
"No severer critic of Socialists ever lived than Karl Marx. No one 
more bitterly attacked them and their policy toward the trade 
unions, than he. . . . And yet Socialists regard him as their patron 
saint." Mr. Samuel Gompers, in The American Federationist, August, 
1905. 

2 Preface to the Communist Manifesto, by F. Engels, Kerr edition, 
page 7. 



12 SOCIALISM 

in England, Fourierists in France, both of these 
already reduced to the position of mere sects, and 
gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most 
multifarious social quacks, who, by all manner of tink- 
ering, professed to redress, without any danger to 
capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in 
both cases, men outside of the working-class move- 
ment, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes 
for support. Whatever portion of the working class 
had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere 
political revolutions, and had proclaimed the neces- 
sity of a total social change, that portion, then, 
called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough- 
hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, 
it touched the cardinal point and was powerful 
enough among the working class to produce the 
Utopian Communism in France of Cabet, and in 
Germany of Weitling. Thus Socialism was, in 
1847, a middle-class movement; Communism, a 
working-class movement. Socialism was, on the 
Continent at least, 'respectable'; Communism was 
the very opposite. And as our notion, from the 
very beginning, was that the 'emancipation of the 
working class must be the act of the working class 
itself,' there could be no doubt as to which of the 
names we must take. Moreover, we have ever since 
been far from repudiating it." 
There is still, unfortunately, much misuse of the 



INTRODUCTION 13 

word "Socialist," even by accredited Socialist writers. 
For instance, writers like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, and 
others, are constantly referred to as Socialists, when, 
as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the sort. 
Still, the word is now pretty generally understood as 
defined by the Socialists; not the "Socialists" of 
sixty years ago, who were mostly Communists, but 
of the present-day Socialists, whose principles find 
classic expression in the Communist Manifesto, 
and to the attainment of which their political pro- 
grammes are directed. 



CHAPTER II 

ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 
I 

In order that we may distinguish between modern 
or scientific Socialism and the Socialism of the 
Utopians, which the Communist Manifesto so se- 
verely criticised, it may perhaps be well to consider 
briefly Utopian Socialism at its best and nearest 
approach to the modern movement. Thus we shall 
get a clear vision of the point of departure which 
marked the rise of the later scientific movement, 
and, incidentally, of the good Robert Owen, whom 
Liebknecht has called, "By far the most embracing, 
penetrating, and practical of all the harbingers of 
scientific Socialism." 

Friedrich Engels, a man not given to praising 
overmuch, has spoken of Owen with an enthusi- 
asm which he rarely showed in his descriptions of 
men. He calls him, "A man of almost sublime and 
childlike simplicity of character," and declares, 
"Every social movement, every real advance in 

14 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN. SPIRIT 15 

England on behalf of the workers, links itself on 
to the name of Robert Owen." * And even this 
high praise from the part-author of the Communist 
Manifesto, who for so many years was called the 
" Nestor of the Socialist Movement/' falls short, 
because it does not recognize the enormous influ- 
ence of the man in the United States in the forma- 
tive period of its history. 

Robert Owen was born of humble parentage, in 
a little town in North Wales, on the fourteenth day 
of May, 1771. Perhaps it is well that he was born 
in such humble circumstances, and that his parents 
could not afford to gratify to the full the desire of 
his boyhood for education. The lad thirsted for 
knowledge, and wanted above all things a university 
education. Poverty kills its thousands, destroys 
hope, ambition, and courage in millions more. But 
sometimes it fails, and the soul it would have killed 
emerges from the struggle triumphant and strong. 
Such a soul had this poor Welsh country lad. His 
scanty schooling ended, and he set out to fight the 
battle of life for himself in London, when he was 
but ten years of age. When he was little more 
than seven years of age, so he tells us in his Auto- 
biography, he had familiarized himself with Milton's 
Paradise Lost. By the time he was ten years of 

1 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, by F. Engels, London, 1892, 
pages 20-25. 



16 SOCIALISM 

age, like Olive Schreiner's boy Waldo in The Story of 
an African Farm, he had grappled with the ages-old 
problem of life, and become a skeptic ! It is doubt- 
ful, however, if his " skepticism" really consisted of 
more than the consciousness that there were apparent 
contradictions in the Bible, a discovery which many 
a precocious lad has made at quite as early an age. 
Still, the incident is worthy of note as indicating 
the boy's inquiring spirit. 

In London, the young lad was apprenticed to 
a draper named McGufTeg, who seems to have been 
a rather superior type of man. From a small peddling 
business he had built up one of the largest and wealth- 
iest establishments in that part of London, catering 
to the wealthy and the titled nobility. Above all, 
McGuffeg was a man of books, and in his well-stocked 
library young Owen could read several hours each 
day, and thus make up in a measure for his early 
lack of educational opportunities. During the three 
years of his apprenticeship he read prodigiously, and 
laid the foundations of that literary culture which 
characterized his whole life and added tremendously 
to his power. 

This is not in any sense of the word a biographical 
sketch of Robert Owen. 1 If it were, the story of 
the rise of this poor, strange, strong lad, from poverty 

1 For a good sketch of Robert Owen's life, see the Biography, by 
Lloyd Jones, in The Social Science Series, London, 1890. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 17 

to the very pinnacle of commercial power and fame, 
as one of the leading manufacturers of his day, 
would lead through pathways of romance as wonderful 
as any in our biographical literature. We are con- 
cerned, however, only with his career as a social 
reformer and the forces which molded it. And that, 
too, has its romantic side. 

II 

The closing years of the eighteenth century marked 
the beginning of a great and far-reaching industrial 
revolution. The introduction of new mechanical 
inventions enormously increased the productive 
powers of England. In 1770 Har greaves patented 
his " spinning jenny," and in the following year 
Arkwright invented his " water frame," a patent 
spinning machine which derived its name from the 
fact that it was worked by water power. Later, 
in 1779, Crompton invented the "mule," which 
was really a combination of the principles of both 
machines. This was a long step forward, and greatly 
facilitated the spinning of the raw material into 
yarn. The invention was, in fact, a revolution in 
itself. Like so many other great inventors, Cromp- 
ton died in poverty. 

Even now, however, the actual weaving of the spun 
yarn had to be done by hand. Not until 1785, when 
Dr. Cartwright, a parson, invented a " power-loom," 



18 SOCIALISM 

was it deemed possible to weave by machinery. 
Cartwright's invention, coming in the same year as 
the general introduction of Watt's steam engine in 
the cotton industry, made the industrial revolution. 
Had the revolution come slowly, had the inventors 
of the new industrial processes been able to accom- 
plish that, it is most probable that much of the misery 
of the period would have been avoided. As it was, 
terrible poverty and hardship attended the birth of 
the new industrial order. Owing to the expense of 
introducing the machines, and the impossibility of 
competing with them by the old methods of produc- 
tion, the small manufacturers themselves were forced 
to the wall, and their misery, forcing them to become 
wage-workers in competition with other already 
far too numerous wage-workers, added greatly to 
the woe of the time. William Morris's fine lines, writ- 
ten a hundred years later, express vividly what many 
a manufacturer must have felt at that time : — 

" Fast and faster our iron master, 
The thing we made, forever drives." 

But perhaps the worst of all the results of the 
new regime was the destruction of the personal re- 
lations which had hitherto existed between the em- 
ployers and their employees. No attention was 
paid to the interests of the latter. The personal re- 
lation was forever gone, and only a hard, cold cash 
nexus remained. Wages went down at an alarm- 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 19 

ing rate, as might be expected; the housing condi- 
tions became simply inhuman. Now it was discov- 
ered that a child at one of the new looms could do 
more than a dozen men had done under the old con- 
ditions, and a tremendous demand for child workers 
was the result. At first, as H. de B. Gibbins 1 tells 
us, there was a strong repugnance on the part of 
parents to sending their children into the factories. 
It was, in fact, considered a disgrace to do so. The 
term " factory girl" was an insulting epithet, and it 
was impossible for a girl who had been employed in a 
factory to obtain other employment. She could not 
look forward to marriage with any but the very low- 
est of men, so degrading was factory employment con- 
sidered to be. But the manufacturers had to get 
children somehow, and they got them. They got 
them from the workhouses. Pretending that they 
were going to apprentice them to a trade, they 
communicated with the overseers of the poor, who 
arranged a day for the inspection of the children to 
suit the convenience of the manufacturer. Those 
chosen were then conveyed to their destination, 
packed in wagons or canal boats, and from that 
moment were doomed to the most awful form of 
slavery. 
" Sometimes regular traffickers would take the 

1 The Industrial History of England, by H. de B. Gibbins, London, 
Methuen and Co. 



20 SOCIALISM 

place of the manufacturer, " says Gibbins, 1 "and 
transfer a number of children to a factory dis- 
trict, and there keep them, generally in some dark 
cellar, till they could hand them over to a mill 
owner in want of hands, who would come and ex- 
amine their height, strength, and bodily capacities, 
exactly as did the slave owners in the American 
markets. After that the children were simply at 
the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, 
but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, 
and whom it was not worth while even to feed and 
clothe properly, because they were so cheap, and 
their places could be so easily supplied. It was often 
arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get 
rid of imbeciles, that one idiot should be taken by 
the mill owner with every twenty sane children. 
The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse 
than that of the others. The secret of their final 
end has never been disclosed, but we can form some 
idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of 
the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. 
The hours of their labor were only- limited by ex- 
haustion, after many modes of torture had been 
unavailingly applied to force continued work. Chil- 
dren were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day 
and by night." 
Terrible as this summary is, it does not equal in 

1 Industrial History of England, page 179. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 21 

horror the account given by "Alfred," * in his His- 
tory of the Factory System. " In stench, in heated 
rooms, amid the constant whirl of a thousand wheels, 
little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless 
action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from 
the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, 
and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of 
punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity 
of insatiable selfishness." The children were fed 
upon the cheapest and coarsest food, often the same 
as that served to their masters' pigs. They slept by 
turns, and in relays, in filthy beds which were never 
cool. There was often no discrimination between 
the sexes, and disease, misery, and vice flourished. 
Some of these miserable creatures would try to run 
away, and to prevent them, those suspected had 
irons riveted on their ankles, with long links reaching 
up to the hips, and were compelled to sleep and work 
with them on, young women and girls, as well as 
boys, suffering this brutal treatment. The number 
of deaths was so great that they were buried secretly 
at night, lest an outcry should be raised; and many 
committed suicide. 

These statements are so appalling that, as Mr. 
R. W. Cooke-Taylor says, 2 they would be " absolutely 

1 This anonymous historian is now known to have been Mr. 
Samuel Kydd, barrister-at-law (vide Cooke-Taylor). 

2 The Factory System and the Factory Acts, by R. W. Cooke- 
Taylor, London, 1894. 



22 SOCIALISM 

incredible were they not fully borne out by evidence 
from other sources." It is not contended, of course, 
that the conditions in all factories were as bad as 
those described. But it must be said emphatically 
that there were worse horrors than any here quoted, 
and equally emphatically that the very best fac- 
tories were only a little better than those described. 
Take, for instance, the account given by Robert Owen 
of the conditions which prevailed in the " model fac- 
tory " of the time, the establishment at New Lanark, 
Scotland, owned by Mr. David Dale, where Owen 
himself was destined to introduce so many striking 
reforms. Owen assumed control of the New Lanark 
mills on the first day of the year 1800. In his Auto- 
biography, 1 he gives some account of the conditions 
which he found there, in the " best-regulated factory 
in the world," at that time. There were, says Owen, 
about five hundred children employed, who "were 
received as early as six years old, the pauper authori- 
ties declining to send them at any later age." They 
worked from six in the morning till seven in the 
evening, and then their education began. They hated 
their slavery, and many absconded. Many were 
dwarfed and stunted in stature, and when they were 
through their "apprenticeship," at thirteen or fifteen 



1 In two volumes : London, Effingham Wilson, 1857 and 1858. 
Vol. I contains the Life ; Vol. II is a Supplementary Appendix, and 
contains Reports, Addresses, etc. Quotations are from Vol. I. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 23 

years of age, they commonly went off to Glasgow or 
Edinburgh, with no guardians, ignorant and ready — 
" admirably suited/' is Owen's phrase — to swell the 
great mass of vice and misery in the towns. The 
people in New Lanark lived " almost without control, 
in habits of vice, idleness, poverty, debt, and destitu- 
tion. Thieving was general." With such condi- 
tions existing in a model factory, under a master 
whose benevolence was celebrated everywhere, it 
can be very readily believed that conditions else- 
where must have been abominable. 

As a result of the appalling poverty which devel- 
oped, it soon became necessary for poor parents to 
permit their children to go into the factories. The 
mighty machines were far too powerful for the 
prejudices of parental hearts. Child wage- workers 
became common. They were subjected to little 
better conditions than the "parish apprentices" had 
been; in fact they were often employed alongside 
of them. Fathers were unemployed, and fre- 
quently took meals to their little ones who were at 
work — a not unusual thing even in the United 
States at the present time. Michael Sadler, a Mem- 
ber of the British House of Commons and a fearless 
champion of the rights of the poor and oppressed, 
has described this aspect of the Child Labor evil 
in touching verse. The poem is too long to quote 
entire, so I give only three stanzas : — 



24 SOCIALISM 

"'Father, I'm up, but weary, 
I scarce can reach the door, 
And long the way and dreary — 
Oh, carry me once more ! 
To help us we've no mother, 
And you have no employ, 
They killed my little brother — 
Like him I'll work and die.' 

" Her wasted form seemed nothing — 
The load was at his heart, 
The sufferer he kept soothing 
Till at the mill they part. 
The overlooker met her, 
As to her frame she crept, 
And with his thong he beat her 
And cursed her as she wept. 

"All night with tortured feeling, 
He watched his speechless child, 
While, close beside her kneeling, 
She knew him not nor smiled. 
Again the factory's ringing 
Her last perceptions tried, 
When, from her straw bed springing, 
' 'Tis time ! ' she shrieked, and died ! " * 

During all this time, let it be remembered, the 
English philanthropists, and among them many capi- 
talists, were agitating against negro slavery in Africa 
and elsewhere, and raising funds for the slaves' 
emancipation. Says Gibbins, 2 " The spectacle of 

1 The poem is given in its entirety by Mr. H. S. Salt, in Songs of 
Freedom, pages 81-83. 

2 Industrial History of England, page 181. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 25 

England buying the freedom of black slaves by riches 
drawn from the labor of her white ones affords an 
interesting study for the cynical philosopher." 

As we read the accounts of the distress which fol- 
lowed upon the introduction of the new mechanical 
inventions, it is impossible to regard with surprise, 
or with condemnatory feelings, the riots of the des- 
perate "Luddites," who went about destroying 
machinery in their blind desperation. Ned Lud, 
after whom the Luddites are said to have been named, 
was an idiot, it is said ; but wiser men, finding them- 
selves reduced to abject poverty through the intro- 
duction of the giant machines, could see no further 
than he. Was it to be expected that they should 
understand that it was not the machines, but the 
institution of their private ownership, and use for 
private gain, that was wrong? The Luddites were 
not, as some writers seem to infer, the first to make 
war upon machinery. In 1758, for example, Everet's 
first machine for dressing wool, an ingenious contriv- 
ance worked by water power, was set upon by a 
mob and reduced to ashes. From that time on 
similar outbreaks occurred with more or less fre-. 
quency ; but it was not until 1810 that the organized 
bodies of Luddites went from town to town, sacking 
factories and destroying the machines in their half- 
blind revolt. 

The contest between the capitalist and the wage- 



26 SOCIALISM 

worker, which, as Karl Marx says, dates back to 
the very origin of capital, took a new form when 
machinery was first introduced. Henceforth, the 
worker fights not only, nor indeed mainly, against the 
capitalist, but against the machine, as the material 
basis of capitalist exploitation. In the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the ribbon loom, a machine for weaving rib- 
bons, was invented in Germany. Marx quotes an 
Italian traveler, Abbe Lancellotti, who wrote in 
1579 as follows: " Anthony Miiller, of Danzig, saw 
about fifty years ago, in that town, a very ingenious 
machine, which weaves four to six pieces at once. 
But the mayor, being apprehensive that this inven- 
tion might throw a large number of workmen on the 
streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled 
or drowned." * In 1629 this ribbon loom was intro- 
duced into Leyden, where the riots of the ribbon 
weavers forced the town council to prohibit it. In 
1676 its use was prohibited in Cologne, at the same 
time that its introduction was causing serious dis- 
turbances in England. "By an imperial Edict of the 
19th of February, 1685, its use was forbidden through- 
out all Germany. In Hamburg it was burned in 
public, by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles 
VI, on the 9th of February, 1719, renewed the Edict 
of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed 
in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine, which 

1 Capital, by Karl Marx, London, 1891, page 427. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 27 

shook all Europe to its foundations, was in fact the 
precursor of the mule and power loom, and of the 
industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. It 
enabled a totally inexperienced boy to set the whole 
loom, with all its shuttles, in motion, by simply 
moving a rod backward and forward, and in its 
improved form produced from forty to fifty pieces 
at once." * 

Much denunciation has been poured upon the 
blind, stupid revolt of the workers against the ma- 
chines, but in view of the misery and poverty which 
they suffered, it is impossible not to sympathize with 
them. As Marx justly says, "It took both time and 
experience before the work people learned to dis- 
tinguish between machinery and its employment by 
capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the 
material instruments of production, but against 
the mode in which they are used." 2 

Ill 

Under the new industrial regime, Robert Owen, 
the erstwhile poor draper's apprentice, soon became 
one of the most successful manufacturers in England. 
At eighteen years of age we find him entering into 
the manufacture of the new cotton spinning machines, 
with a borrowed capital of $500. His partner was a 

1 Capital, page 428. 

2 Idem, page 429. 



28 SOCIALISM 

man named Jones, and, though the enterprise proved 
successful from a financial point of view, the partner- 
ship proved to be most disagreeable. Accordingly 
it was dissolved, Owen taking three of the " mules" 
which they were making as a reimbursement for his 
investment. With these and some other machinery, 
Owen entered into the cotton manufacturing indus- 
try, employing at first only three men, and made 
$1500 as his first year's profit. 

Erelong Owen ceased manufacturing upon his own 
account, and became superintendent of a Man- 
chester cotton mill, owned by a Mr. Drinkwater, and 
employing some five hundred work people. He was 
a most progressive man, always ready to introduce 
new machinery, and to embark upon new experiments, 
with a view to improving the quality of the product. 1 
In this he was so successful that the goods manu- 
factured at the Drinkwater mill soon commanded 
a fifty per cent advance above the regular market 
prices. Drinkwater, delighted at results like these, 
made Owen his partner. Thus when he was barely 
twenty years of age, Owen had secured an eminent 
position among the cotton manufacturers of his 



1 For instance, he so improved the machinery and increased the 
fineness of the threads that, instead of spinning seventy-five thousand 
yards of yarn to the pound of cotton, he spun two hundred and fifty 
thousand ! At that time a pound of cotton, which in its raw state 
was worth $1.25, became worth $50 when spun. — Life of Robert 
Owen, Philadelphia, 1866. — Anonymous. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 29 

time. It is interesting to recall that in the same 
year, 1791, Owen used the first cotton ever brought 
into England from the United States. " American 
Sea Island cotton," as it was called, from the fact 
that it was then grown only upon the islands near 
the southern coast of the United States, was not be- 
lieved to be of any value for manufacture, on account, 
chiefly, of its poor color. But when a cotton broker 
named Spear received three hundred pounds of it 
from an American planter, with the request that he 
would get some competent spinner to test it, he 
applied to Owen, who, with characteristic readiness, 
undertook the test, and succeeded in making a much 
finer product than had hitherto been made from the 
French cotton, though inferior to it in color. That 
was the first introduction of American cotton, des- 
tined soon to furnish English cotton mills with the 
greater part of their raw material. 

Owen did not long remain with Mr. Drinkwater. 
He accepted another profitable partnership in Man- 
chester, and it was at this time that he became active 
in social reform work. As a member of an impor- 
tant literary and philosophical society, he was 
thrown much into the company of men distinguished 
in all walks of fife, and here he began that agitation 
which led to the passing of the very first factory act 
of Sir Robert Peel, in 1802. The suffering of the 
children moved his great humane heart to boundless 



30 SOCIALISM 

pity. He well knew that his own wealth and the 
wealth of his fellows had been purchased at a terrible 
cost in child life. He was only a philanthropist as 
yet; he saw only the pitiful waste of life involved, 
and sought to impress men of wealth with what he 
felt. 

On the first day of the nineteenth century, Owen 
began his wonderful New Lanark career, which 
attracted universal attention, and was destined to 
lead him to those social innovations which won for 
him the title of "Father of Modern Socialism." 
We have already seen what the conditions were in 
the "model factory" when Owen assumed con- 
trol. Here all his influence was directed to the 
task of ameliorating the condition of his employees. 
He shortened the hours of labor, introduced sanitary 
reforms, protected the work people against the ex- 
ploitation of traders through the vicious credit sys- 
tem by opening a store and supplying them with 
goods at cost, and established infant schools, the 
first of their kind, for the care and education of chil- 
dren from two years of age upward. Still, the 
workers themselves were suspicious of this man 
who, so different from other employers, was zealous 
in doing things for them. He really knew nothing 
of the working class, and it never had occurred to 
him that they might do anything for themselves. 
New Lanark under Owen was, to use the phrase 



KOBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 31 

which Mr. Ghent has adopted from Fourier, "a be- 
nevolent feudalism." Owen complains pathetically, 
"Yet the work people were systematically opposed to 
every change which I proposed, and did whatever 
they could to frustrate my object." * 

But a time came when Owen had the necessary 
opportunity to win their affection — and he em- 
braced it. In 1806 the United States, in conse- 
quence of a diplomatic rupture with England, placed 
an embargo upon the shipment of raw cotton to that 
country. Everywhere mills were shut down, and 
there was the utmost distress in consequence. The 
New Lanark mills, in common with most others, 
were shut down for four months, during which time 
Owen paid every worker his or her wages in full, at 
a cost of over $35,000. Forever afterward he en- 
joyed the love and trust of his work people. In 
spite of all this expenditure upon purely philan- 
thropic work, the mills yielded an enormous profit. 
But Owen was constantly in conflict with his partners, 
who sought to restrict him in his efforts, with the 
result that he was compelled again and again to 
change partners, always securing their interests and 
returning them big profits upon their investments, un- 
til finally, in 1829, he left New Lanark altogether. 
During twenty-nine years he had carried on the 
business with splendid commercial success and at 

1 Autobiography. 



32 SOCIALISM 

the same time attracted universal attention to it 
as the theater of the greatest experiments in social 
regeneration the world had ever known. Every year 
thousands of persons from all parts of the world, 
many of them statesmen and representatives of the 
crowned heads of Europe, visited New Lanark to 
study those experiments, and never were they seriously 
criticised or their success challenged. Had Owen's 
life ended here, he must have taken rank in history 
as one of the truly great men of the nineteenth 
century. 

IV 

Let us now consider briefly the forces which led 
this gentle philanthropist onward to the goal of Com- 
munism. In the first place, his experiences at New 
Lanark had convinced him that human character de- 
pends in large part upon, and is shaped by, environ- 
ment. Others before Owen had perceived this, but 
he must ever be regarded as one of the pioneers of 
the idea, among the first to give it definite form and 
to demonstrate its truth. In the first of those won- 
derful Essays on the Formation of Human Character, 
in which Owen recounts the results of his New Lan- 
ark system of education, he says, "Any general char- 
acter from the best to the worst, from the most igno- 
rant to the most enlightened, may be given to any 
community, even to the world at large, by the ap- 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 33 

plication of proper means ; which means are to a great 
extent at the command and under the control of 
those who have influence in the affairs of men." To- 
day this doctrine does not seem to us sensational 
or strange; it might be promulgated in any one of 
our fashionable churches, without exciting more 
than a languid passing interest. But in Owen's 
time it was quite otherwise. Such a doctrine struck 
at the very roots of all that the church stood for, and 
brought much bitter denunciation upon the heads of 
its promulgators. A poet of the period, in a poem 
dedicated to Owen, aptly expresses the doctrine : — 

" We are the creatures of external things, 
Acting on inward organs, and are made 
To think and do whate'er our tutors please. 
What folly, then, to punish or reward 
For deeds o'er which we never held a curb ! 
What woeful ignorance, to teach the crime 
And then chastise the pupil for his guilt ! " 1 

Owen had realized other things at New Lanark 
besides the profound truth that man's character is 
formed largely by his environment. Starting out 
with no other purpose than to ameliorate the condi- 
tions of his work people, he came, at last, to recog- 
nize that he could never do for them the essential 
thing, — secure their real liberty. "The people were 

1 The Force of Circumstances, a poem, by John Garwood, Birming- 
ham, 1808. 



34 SOCIALISM 

slaves of my mercy/' 1 he writes. He saw, though 
but dimly at first, that no man could be free who 
depended upon another for the right to earn his 
bread, no matter how good the bread master might 
be. The hopelessness of expecting reform from the 
manufacturers themselves was borne upon his mind 
in many ways. First of all, there was the incessant 
conflict with his associates, who, while representing 
the noblest and best elements of the manufacturing 
class, still failed to comprehend the spirit of all 
Owen's work, his profound belief in the inherent 
right of every child to the opportunities of sound 
physical, mental, and moral culture. Then there 
was the bitter hostility of those of his class who had 
no sympathy whatever with him. 

The Luddite riots of 1810-1811 awakened England 
to the importance of the labor question, and Owen, 
who since 1805 had been devoting much time to 
its study, secured a much wider audience, and a 
much more serious hearing than ever before. Then 
came the frightful misery of 1815, due to the crisis 
which the end of the great war produced. Every- 
one seemed to think that when the war was over 
and peace was restored, there would be a tremendous 
increase in prosperity. What happened was pre- 
cisely the opposite; for a time at least things were 

1 Quoted by F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, page 22 
(English edition, 1892). 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 35 

immeasurably worse than before. Owen, more 
clearly than any other man of the time, explained the 
real nature of the crisis. The war had given an 
important spur to industry and encouraged many 
new inventions and chemical discoveries. "The war 
was the great and most extravagant customer of 
farmers, manufacturers, and other producers of 
wealth, and many during this period became very 
wealthy. . . . And on the day on which peace 
was signed, the great customer of the producers died, 
and prices fell as the demand dim iui shed, until the 
prime cost of the articles required for war could not 
be obtained. . . . Barns and farmyards were full, 
warehouses loaded, and such was our artificial state 
of society that this very superabundance of wealth 
was the sole cause of the existing distress. Burn the 
stock in the farmyards and warehouses, and prosperity 
would immediately recommence, in the same manner as 
if the war had continued. This want of demand at 
remunerating prices compelled the master producers 
to consider what they could do to diminish the 
amount of their productions and the cost of pro- 
ducing until these surplus stocks could be taken out 
of the market. To effect these results, every econ- 
omy in producing was resorted to, and men being 
more expensive machines for producing than mechan- 
ical and chemical inventions and discoveries so ex- 
tensively brought into action during the war, the 



36 SOCIALISM 

men were discharged and the machines were made 
to supersede them — while the numbers of the un- 
employed were increased by the discharge of men 
from the army and navy. Hence the great distress 
for want of work among all classes whose labor was 
so much in demand while the war continued. This 
increase of mechanical and chemical power was con- 
tinually diminishing the demand for, and value of, 
manual labor, and would continue to do so, and 
would effect great changes throughout society." * 

In this statement there are several points worthy 
of attention. In the first place, the analysis of the 
crisis of 1815 is very like the later analyses of com- 
mercial crises of the Marxists; secondly, the antag- 
onism of class interests is clearly developed, as far 
as the basic interests of the employers and their em- 
ployees are concerned. The former, in order to con- 
serve their interests, have to dismiss the workers, 
thus forcing them into direst poverty; thirdly, the 
conflict between manual and machine labor is frankly 
stated. Owen's studies were leading him from mere 
philanthropism to Socialism. 

During the height of the distress of 1815, Owen 
called together a large number of cotton manufac- 
turers at a conference, which was held in Glasgow, 
to consider the state of the cotton trade and the pre- 

1 Quoted by H. M. Hyndman, The Economics of Socialism, page 
150. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 37 

vailing distress. He proposed, (1) that they should 
petition parliament for the repeal of the revenue 
tariff on raw cotton; (2) that they should call upon 
parliament to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton 
mills by legislative enactment, and otherwise seek 
to improve the condition of the working people. 
The first proposition was carried with unanimity, 
but the second, and to Owen the most important, 
did not even secure a seconder. 1 The spirit in which 
he faced the manufacturers is best seen in the follow- 
ing extract from the address delivered by him at 
this conference, with copies of which he afterward 
literally deluged the kingdom : — 

"True, indeed, it is that the main pillar and prop 
of the political greatness and prosperity of our coun- 
try is a manufacture which, as now carried on, is 
destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort 
of the mass of people engaged in it. It is only since 
the introduction of the cotton trade that children, 
at an age before they had acquired strength or men- 
tal instruction, have been forced into cotton mills, — 
those receptacles, in too many instances, for living, 
human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where 
as the business is often now conducted, they linger 
out a few years of miserable existence, acquiring 
every bad habit which they may disseminate through- 

1 The New Harmony Communities, by George Browning Lock- 
wood (1902), page 71. 



38 SOCIALISM 

out society. It is only since the introduction of this 
trade that children and even grown people were 
required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, 
not including the time allotted for meals. It is only 
since the introduction of this trade that the sole 
recreation of the laborer is to be found in the pot- 
house or ginshop, and it is only since the introduc- 
tion of this baneful trade that poverty, crime, and 
misery have made rapid and fearful strides through- 
out the community. 

"Shall we then go unblushingly, and ask the legis- 
lators of our country to pass legislative acts to sanc- 
tion and increase this trade — to sign the death 
warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of 
thousands of our fellow-creatures, and not attempt 
to propose corrections for the evils which it creates? 
If such shall be your determination, I, for one, will 
not join in the application, — no, I will, with all the 
faculties I possess, oppose every attempt made to 
extend the trade that, except in name, is more inju- 
rious to those employed in it than is the slavery in 
the West Indies to the poor negroes; for deeply as 
I am interested in the cotton manufacture, highly 
as I value the extended political power of my country, 
yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here 
and in England, the miseries which this trade, as it 
is now conducted, inflicts on those to whom it gives 
employment, I do not hesitate to say: Perish the 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 39 

cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of 
our country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather 
than that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of every- 
thing valuable in life." l 

This conference had undoubtedly much to do 
with Owen's subsequent acceptance of the Socialist 
ideal, and it is probable, as one of his biographers 
has hinted, that the change of the approbation of 
the governing class to reprobation really dates from 
that outspoken attack upon the economic interests 
of the growing manufacturing industry rather than 
from the fierce onslaught upon religion, or, more 
correctly, religious hypocrisy, in the following year. 
Be that how it may, the fact is that by 1815 Owen 
was pretty much of a Socialist, though he did not 
declare himself one until some years later. 

In 1817 he proposed to the government the estab- 
lishment of communistic villages, as the best means 
of remedying the terrible distress which prevailed 
at that time. Henceforth, Owen is the apostle of 
Communism, or as he later preferred to say, Social- 
ism. His ideal is a cooperative world, with perfect 
equality between the sexes. He had so completely 
demonstrated to his own mind that private prop- 
erty was incompatible with social well-being, every 
month of his experience at New Lanark had so deeply 

1 Quoted by Lockwood, The New Harmony Communities, pages 
71-72. 



40 SOCIALISM 

impressed him with the conviction that to make it 
possible for all men to live equally happy and moral 
lives they must have equal material resources and 
conditions of life, that he could not understand why 
it had never occurred to others before him. He 
regarded himself as one inspired, or as an inventor 
of a new system, and believed that it was only neces- 
sary for him to demonstrate the truth of his conten- 
tions, argumentatively and in practice, to convert the 
world. He conducted a tremendous propaganda, 
by means of newspapers, pamphlets, lectures, and 
debates, and above all, established various commu- 
nities in this country 1 and in England. With sub- 
lime faith and unbounded courage, he kept on in the 
face of bitter opposition and repeated failure. And 
to this day, the story of the New Harmony experi- 
ment, despite the fact that it was short-lived, and 
that it failed, is full of inspiration for him who would 
give his life to the redemption of the world from the 
cruel grasp of private greed. 

Owen's communities failed, and the world has long 
since written the word "Failure" against his name. 
But what a splendid failure it was! Standing by 
his grave one day, in the picturesque little church- 
yard at Newton, by a bend of the winding river, 
not far from the ruins of the ancient castle home 

1 For a good account of these communities, see Lockwood's book, 
The New Harmony Communities, already quoted. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 41 

of the famous deist, Lord Herbert, I said to an old 
Welsh laborer, "But his life was a failure, was it 
not?" The old man gazed awhile at the grave, and 
then with a voice of reverence and love, replied, "I 
suppose it was, sir, as the world goes; a failure like 
Jesus Christ's. But I don't call it failure, sir. He 
established infant schools; he founded the great 
Cooperative movement; he helped to make the 
trade unions ; * he worked for peace between two 
great countries. His Socialism has not been realized 
yet, nor yet has Christ's — but it will come!" As 
I turned and clasped the old man's hand, the sun 
emerged from the clouds and bathed the grave with 
glory. 



Owen was not the only builder of Utopias in his 
time. In the same year that Owen launched his 
New Harmony experiment, there died in Paris another 
dreamer of social Utopias, a gentle mystic, Henry de 
Saint-Simon, and in 1837, the year of Owen's third 
Socialist congress, another great Utopist died in the 
French capital, Charles Fourier. Each of these con- 
tributed something to the development of the theories 
of Socialism, each has a legitimate place in the history 

1 Owen presided at the first organized Trade Union Congress in 
England. 



42 SOCIALISM 

of the Socialist movement. But this little work is not 
intended to give the history of Socialism. 1 I have taken 
one only of the three great Utopists, as representative 
of them all : one who seems to me to be much nearer 
to the later scientific movement pioneered by Marx 
and Engels than any of the others. In the Socialism 
of Owen, we have Utopian Socialism at its best. 

What distinguishes the Utopists from their scientific 
followers has been clearly stated by Engels in the 
following luminous passage: "One thing is common 
to all three. Not one of them appears as a repre- 
sentative of the interests of that proletariat which 
historical development had . . . produced. Like the 
French philosophers, 2 they do not claim to emancipate 
a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at 
once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom 
of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as 
they see it, is as far as heaven from earth from that 
of the French philosophers. 

"For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois 
world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, 
is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds 
its way to the dust hole quite as readily, as feudalism 
and all the ear her stages of society. If pure reason 
and justice had not, hitherto, ruled the world, this 

1 For the history of these and other Utopian Socialisms, see Professor 
Ely's French and German Socialism (1883) ; also M. Hillquit's History 
of Socialism in the United States (1903). 

2 The Encyclopaedists. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 43 

has been the case only because men have not rightly 
understood them. What was wanted was the in- 
dividual man of genius, who has now arisen and who 
understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that 
the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an 
inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain 
of historical development, but a mere happy acci- 
dent. He might just as well have been born five 
hundred years earlier, and might then have spared 
humanity five hundred years of error, strife, and 
suffering. " * 

Neither of these great Utopists had anything like 
the conception of social evolution determined by 
economic conditions and the resulting conflicts of 
economic classes which constitutes the base of the 
philosophy of the scientific Socialists. Each of them 
had some faint comprehension of isolated facts, but 
neither of them developed his knowledge very far, nor 
could these facts appear to them as correlated by Marx. 
Saint-Simon, as we know, recognized the class struggle 
in the French Revolution, and saw in the Reign of 
Terror only the reign of the non-possessing masses ; 2 
he saw, too, that the political question was funda- 
mentally an economic question, declaring that poli- 
tics is the science of production, and prophesying 
that politics would become absorbed by economics. 3 

1 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, pages 6-7. 

2 Idem, page 15. 3 Idem. 



44 SOCIALISM 

Fourier, we also know, applied the principle of evolu- 
tion to society. He divided the history of society 
into four great epochs — savagery, barbarism, the 
patriarchate, and civilization. 1 But just as Saint- 
Simon failed to grasp the significance of the class 
conflict and its relation to the fundamental character 
of economic institutions which he dimly realized, so 
Fourier failed to grasp the significance of the evolu- 
tionary process which he described, and, like Saint- 
Simon, he halted upon the brink, so to speak, of an 
important discovery. His concept of social evolution 
meant little or nothing to him, and possessed little 
more than an academic interest. And the other great 
Utopist, Owen, realized in a practical manner that 
the industrial problem was a class conflict. Not only 
had he found in 1815 2 that pity was powerless to 
move the hearts of his fellow- manufacturers when 
their class interests were concerned, but later, in 
1818, when he went to present his famous memorial 
to the Congress of Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, 
he had another lesson of the same kind. At Frank- 
fort, Germany, he tarried on his way to the Congress, 
and was invited to attend a great dinner to meet the 
Secretary of the Congress, M. Gentz, a famous diplo- 
mat in his day, "who enjoyed the full confidence of 
the leading despots of Europe." After Owen had out- 

1 Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, page 18. 

2 See page 37. 



ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT 45 

lined his schemes for social amelioration, M. Gentz 
was asked for his reply, and Owen tells us that the 
diplomat replied, "We know very well that what you 
say is true, but how could we govern the masses, 
if they were wealthy, and so, independent of us?" * 
Lord Lauderdale, too, had exclaimed, "Nothing [i.e. 
than Owen's plans] could be more complete for the 
poor and working classes, but what will become ofus?" 2 
Scattered throughout his writings and speeches are 
numerous evidences of the fact that Owen at times 
recognized the class antagonisms in the industrial 
problem, 3 but to him also the germ of a profound 
truth meant nothing. He saw only an isolated fact, 
and made no attempt to discover its meaning or to 
relate it to his teaching. 

Each of the three men regarded himself as the 
discoverer of the truth which should redeem the 
world; each devoted himself with magnificent faith 
and heroic courage to his task ; each failed to realize 
his hopes ; and each left behind him faithful disciples 
and followers, confident that the day must come at 
last when the suffering and disinherited of earth 
will be able to say, in Owen's dying words: — 
"Relief has come." 

1 Autobiography. 

2 Idem. 

3 See, for instance, The Revolution in Mind and Practice, by Robert 
Owen, pages 21-22. 



CHAPTER III 

THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIEN- 
TIFIC SPIRIT 



The Oommunist Manifesto has been called the 
birth cry of the modern scientific Socialist move- 
ment. When it was written, at the beginning of 
1848, little remained of those great social movements 
which in the early part of the century had inspired 
the world with high hopes of social regeneration and 
rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The 
Saint-Simonians had, as an organized body, dis- 
appeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling sect, 
discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of 
their system, the famous Brook Farm experiment in 
the United States ; the Owenite movement had never 
recovered from the failures of the experiments at New 
Harmony and elsewhere, and had lost much of its 
identity through the multiplicity of interests em- 
braced in Owen's propaganda. Chartism and Trades 

46 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO " 47 

Unionism on the one hand, and the Cooperative 
Societies on the other, had, between them, absorbed 
most of the vital elements of the Owenite move- 
ment. 

There was a multitude of what Engels calls " social 
quacks," but the really great social movements, 
Owenism in England, and Fourierism in France, were 
utterly demoralized and rapidly dwindling away. 
One thing only served to keep the flame of hope alive 
— "the crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of 
Communism" of the workers. This Communism of 
the working class differed in its essential features 
from the Socialism of Fourierism and Owenism. 
It was based upon the "rights of labor," and its 
appeal was, primarily, to the laborer. Its exponents 
were Wilhelm Weitling in Germany, and Etienne 
Cabet in France. 

Weitling was a man of the people. He was born 
in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1808, the illegitimate 
child of a humble woman and her soldier lover. He 
became a tailor, and, as was the custom in Germany 
at that time, traveled extensively during his appren- 
ticeship. In 1838 his first important work, The 
World as it Is, and as it Might Be, appeared, published 
in Paris by a secret revolutionary society consisting 
mainly of German workingmen of the "Young 
Germany" movement. In this work, Weitling first 
expounded at length his communistic theories. It 



48 SOCIALISM 

is claimed ' that his conversion to Communism was 
the result of the chance placing of a Fourierist paper 
upon the table of a Berlin coffeehouse, by Albert 
Brisbane, the brilliant American friend and disciple 
of Fourier, his first exponent in the English language. 
This may well be true, for, as we shall see, Weitling's 
views are mainly based upon those of the great French 
Utopist. In 1842 Weitling published his best-known 
work, the book upon which his literary fame chiefly 
rests, The Guaranties of Harmony and Freedom. This 
work at once attracted wide attention, and gave 
Weitling a foremost place among the writers of the 
time in the affections of the educated workers. It 
was an elaboration of the theories contained in his 
earlier book. Morris Hillquit 2 thus describes Weit- 
ling's philosophy and method: — 

"In his social philosophy, Weitling may be said to 
have been the connecting link between primitive and 
modern Socialism. In the main, he is still a Utopian, 
and his writings betray the unmistakable influence 
of the early French Socialists. In common with all 
Utopians, he bases his philosophy exclusively upon 
moral grounds. Misery and poverty are to him but 
the results of human malice, and his cry is for 'eternal 

1 Cf. Social Democracy Red Book, edited by Frederic Heath (1900), 
page 79. 

2 History of Socialism in the United States, by Morris Hillquit, 
pages 161-162. 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO " 49 

justice ' and for the ' absolute liberty and equality 
of all mankind.' In his criticism of the existing order, 
he leans closely on Fourier, from whom he also bor- 
rowed the division of labor into three classes of the 
Necessary, Useful, and Attractive, and the plan of 
organization of ' attractive industry. ' 

"His ideal of the future state of society reminds us 
of the Saint-Simonian government of scientists. The 
administration of affairs of the entire globe is to be 
in the hands of the three greatest authorities on 
'philosophical medicine/ physics, and mechanics, who 
are to be reenforced by a number of subordinate com- 
mittees. His state of the future is a highly central- 
ized government, and is described by the author with 
the customary details. Where Weitling, to some 
extent, approaches the conception of modern Social- 
ism, is in his recognition of class distinctions between 
employer and employee. This distinction never 
amounted to a conscious indorsement of the modern 
Socialist doctrine of the 'class struggle/ but his 
views on the antagonism between the 'poor' and the 
'wealthy ' came quite close to it. He was a firm 
believer in labor organizations as a factor in develop- 
ing the administrative abilities of the working class; 
the creation of an independent labor party was one 
of his pet schemes, and his appeals were principally 
addressed to the workingmen. 

"Unlike most of his predecessors and contempo- 



50 SOCIALISM 

raries, Weitling was not a mere critic; he was an 
enthusiastic preacher, an apostle of a new faith, and 
his writings and speeches breathed of love for his 
fellow-men, and of an ardent desire for their happi- 
ness." 

iJtienne Cabet was, in many ways, a very different 
type of man from Weitling, yet their ideas were not 
so dissimilar. Cabet, born in Dijon, France, in 1788, 
was the son of a fairly prosperous cooper, and re- 
ceived a good university education. He studied both 
medicine and law, adopting the profession of the 
latter, and early achieving success in its practice. 
He took a leading part in the Revolution of 1830 as 
a member of the " Committee of Insurrection/' and 
upon the accession of Louis Phillipe was "rewarded" 
by being made Attorney-General for Corsica. There 
is no doubt that the government desired to remove 
Cabet from the political life of Paris, quite as much 
as to reward him for his services during the Revolu- 
tion ; his strong radicalism, combined with his sturdy 
independence of character, being rightly regarded as 
dangerous to Louis Phillipe's regime. His reward, 
therefore, took the form of practical banishment. 
The wily advisers of Louis Phillipe gave him the 
gloved hand. But the best-laid schemes of mice and 
courtiers "gang oft agley." Cabet, in Corsica, joined 
the radical anti-administration forces, and became 
a thorn in the side of the government. He was re- 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" 51 

moved from office and returned to Paris, whereupon 
the citizens of Dijon, his native town, elected him as 
their deputy to the lower chamber in 1834. Here he 
continued his opposition to the administration, and 
was at last tried on a charge of lese majeste, and given 
the option of choosing between two years' imprison- 
ment or five years' exile. 

Cabet chose exile, and took up his residence in 
England, where he fell under the influence of the 
Owen agitation and became a convert to Owen's 
Socialistic views. During this time of exile, too; he 
became acquainted with the Utopia of Sir Thomas 
More and was fascinated by it. The idea of writing 
a similar work of fiction to propagate Socialism im- 
pressed itself upon his mind, and he wrote a " philo- 
sophical and social romance," entitled Voyage to 
Icaria, 1 which was published soon after his return to 
Paris, in 1839. In this novel Cabet follows closely 
the method of More, and describes " Icaria" as "a 
Promised Land, an Eden, an Elysium, a new ter- 
restrial Paradise." The plot of the book is simple in 
the extreme and its literary merit is far from being 
very great. The writer represents that he met, in 
London, a nobleman, Lord William Carisdall, who, 
having by chance heard of Icaria and the wonder- 
fully strange customs and form of government of its 
inhabitants, visited the country. Lord William kept 

1 Voyage en Icarie. 



52 SOCIALISM 

a journal, in which he described all that he saw in this 
wonderland. It is this journal, we are told, which 
the traveler had permitted to be published through 
the medium of his friend, and under his editorial 
supervision. The first part of the book contains an 
attractive account of the cooperative system of the 
Icarians, their communistic government, equality of 
the sexes, and high standard of morality. The second 
part is devoted to an account of the history of Icaria, 
prior to, and succeeding, the Revolution of 1782, 
when the great national hero, Icar, established 
Communism. 

The book created a tremendous furore in France. 
It appealed strongly to the discontented masses, and 
it is said that by 1847 Cabet had no less than four 
hundred thousand adherents among the workers of 
France. It is possible, cum grano salts, to accept this 
statement only by remembering that a very infini- 
tesimal proportion of these were adherents in the 
sense of being ready to follow his leadership, as sub- 
sequent experience showed. Still, the effect of the 
book was tremendous, and it served to fire the flag- 
ging zeal of those workers for social regeneration 
whose hearts must otherwise have become deadly 
sick from long-deferred hopes. 

The confluence of these two streams of Communist 
propaganda represented by Weitling and Cabet con- 
stituted the real Communist " movement" of 1840- 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" 53 

1847. 1 Its organized expression was the Communist 
League, a secret organization with its headquarters 
in London. The League was formed in Paris in 
1836 by German refugees and traveling workmen, 
and seems to have been an offspring of Mazzini's 
" Young Europe" agitation of 1834. At different 
times it bore the names, " League of the Just," 
"League of the Righteous," and, finally, " Communist 
League." 2 For many years it remained a mere con- 
spiratory society, exclusively German, and existed 
mainly for the purpose of fostering the "Young Ger- 
many" ideas. Later it became an International 
Alliance with societies in many parts of Europe. 
Thus it was that, in 1847, the League in Paris wrote 
inviting Karl Marx, who was at that time in Brus- 
sels, — where, in accordance with an understanding 
arrived at with the leaders of the Paris League while 
he was in that city, he had formed a similar society — 
to join, together with Friedrich Engels, the inter- 
national organization, and promising that a congress 
should be convened in London at an early date. 
Engels was in Paris at that time, and was probably 
responsible for the step taken by the League leaders. 
We may, in view of Engels' after career as the poli- 
tician of the movement, surmise so much. Be that 



1 F. Engels, Introduction to The Communist Manifesto, page 5. 

2 E. Belfort Bax, article on Friedrich Engels, in Justice (London), 
No. 606, Vol. XII, August 24, 1895. 



54 SOCIALISM 

how it may, the reason for the step, the object of the 
proposed Congress, is quite clear. Marx himself has 
placed it beyond dispute. During his stay in Paris, 
he and Engels had discussed the position of the 
League with some of its leaders, and he had, later, 
criticised it in the most merciless manner in his 
pamphlets. 1 He desired a revolutionary working 
class party with a definite aim and policy. The 
leaders of the League who agreed with him in this 
were the prime movers for the Congress, which was 
held in London, in November, 1847. At this Con- 
gress, Marx and Engels presented their views at 
great length, and outlined the principles and policy 
which their famous pamphlet later made familiar. 
Their views finding much favor, as was perfectly 
natural with an inchoate mass of men only waiting 
for leadership, they were requested to prepare 
"a complete theoretical and working programme" 
for the League. This took the form of the Commu- 
nist Manifesto, published in the early part of January, 
1848. 



II 



The authors of the Manifesto were men of great 
intellectual gifts. Either of them alone must have 
won fame; together, they won immortality. Their 

1 Disclosures about the Communists' Process, Herr Vogt, etc. 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO " 55 

lives, from the date of their first meeting in Paris, 
in 1844, to the death of Marx almost forty years later, 
in 1883, are inseparably interwoven. The friendship 
of Damon and Pythias was not more remarkable. 

Karl Marx was born in 1818, on the fifth day of 
May, at Treves, the oldest town in Germany, dating 
back to Roman times. 1 His father was a Jewish law- 
yer of prominence and great learning ; his mother, the 
descendant of Hungarian Jews who in the seventeenth 
century had settled in Holland. On his father's 
side, Marx was the descendant of a long line of Rab- 
bis, 2 unbroken for two hundred years prior to his 
father. The true family name was Mordechia, but 
that was abandoned by the grandfather, who adopted 
the name of Marx. Either shortly before the birth 
of Karl, or shortly afterward, 3 his father received 
notice that he must either forego his official position 
and the practice of his profession, or, with his family, 
accept the Christian faith and baptism. Caring 
nothing for the Hebrew religion, steeped in the mate- 
rialism of eighteenth-century France, and an ardent 

1 Liebknecht, Karl Marx : Biographical Memoirs, page 13. 

2 Thus Franz Mehring, quoted by Kirkup, History of Socialism, 
page 130; thus, also, Dawson, German Socialism and Ferdinand 
Lassalle, page 91 ; but Eleanor Marx, quoted by Liebknecht, Memoirs 
of Marx, page 165, seems to place the rabbinical ancestry on the 
mother's side. 

3 The date of this occurrence is not known. It is given variously 
from 1814 to 1824. In the Memoirs Liebknecht says it was soon 
after the birth of Marx (page 13), but on page 164 he quotes Marx's 
daughter's opinion that it was before the son's birth. 



56 SOCIALISM 

disciple of Voltaire, he did not hesitate to submit to 
the decree, and he and his family were baptized. But 
the son, though he likewise cared nothing for the 
Jewish religion, never forgave the slight thus put 
upon his race. He was proud of being a Jew, proud 
of his rabbinical ancestry, and perhaps owed to the 
latter some of his marvelous gift of exposition. 

At the earnest behest of his father, Marx studied 
law at the universities of Berlin and Bonn. But 
"to please himself, " he studied history and philosophy 
and won great distinction in those branches of learn- 
ing. He graduated in 1841, as a Doctor of Philosophy, 
with an essay on the philosophy of Epictetus, and it 
was his purpose to settle at Bonn as a lecturer in 
philosophy. That plan was abandoned, partly be- 
cause he had already discovered that his bent was 
toward political activity, and partly because the 
Prussian government had made scholastic independ- 
ence impossible. Accordingly, Marx accepted the 
offer of the editorship of a democratic paper, the 
Rhenish Gazette, in which he waged bitter, relentless 
war upon the government. Time after time the 
censors interfered, but Marx was too brilliant a 
polemicist, even thus early in his career, for the 
censors. So, finally, at the request of his managers, 
Marx retired. They hoped thus to avoid being com- 
pelled to suspend the publication, but in vain; the 
government suppressed the paper in March, 1843. 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO " 57 

Soon after this he removed to Paris, with his young 
bride of a few months, Jenny von Westphalen, the 
playmate of his childhood. The Von Westphalens 
were of the nobility, and a brother of Marx's wife 
afterward became a Prussian Minister of State. 
The elder Von Westphalen was half Scotch, related, 
on his maternal side, to the Argyles. Liebknecht 
tells an amusing story of how Marx, many years later, 
having to pawn some of his wife's heirlooms, especially 
some heavy, antique, silver spoons which bore the 
Argyle crest and motto, "Truth is my Maxim," nar- 
rowfy escaped being arrested on suspicion of having 
robbed the Argyles ! * To Paris, then, Marx went, 
and there met, among others, P. J. Proudhon, Michael 
Bakunin, Arnold Ruge, Heinrich Heine, and, above 
all, the man destined to be his very alter, ego, Friedrich 
Engels, with whom he had already had some corre- 
spondence. 2 

The attainments of Engels have been somewhat 
overshadowed by those of his friend. Born at 
Barmen, in the province of the Rhine, November 
28, 1820, he was educated in the Gymnasium of that 
city, and, after serving his period of military ser- 
vice, from 1837 to 1841, was sent, in the early part of 
1842, to Manchester, England, to look after a cotton- 



1 Memoirs of Marx, page 164. 

2 Karl Kautsky, article on F. Engels, Austrian Labor Almanac, 
1887. 



58 SOCIALISM 

spinning business of which his father was principal 
owner. Here he seems to have at once begun a 
thorough investigation of social and industrial con- 
ditions, the results of which are contained in his 
book, The Condition of the Working Class in England 
in 1844, which remains to this day a classic presenta- 
tion of the social and industrial life of the period. 
From the very first, already predisposed as we know, 
he sympathized with the views of the Chartists and 
the Owenite Socialists. He became friendly with 
the Chartist leaders, notably with Feargus O'Connor, 
to whose paper, The Northern Star, he became a 
contributor. He also became friendly with Robert 
Owen and wrote for his New Moral World. 1 His 
linguistic abilities were great ; it is said that he had 
thoroughly mastered no less than ten languages — a 
gift which helped him immensely in his literary and 
political association with Marx. 

When the two men met for the first time, in 1844, 
they were drawn together by an irresistible impulse. 
They were kindred spirits. Marx, during his stay in 
Paris, already regarded as a leader of radical thought, 
had fallen under the influence of the Saint-Simonians 
and become definitely a Socialist. At first this seems 
difficult to explain, so great is the chasm which yawns 
between the "New Christianity" of Saint-Simon and 

1 E. Belfort Bax, article on Friedrich Engels in Justice (London), 
No. 606, Vol. XII, August 24, 1895. 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO " 59 

the materialism of Marx. Assuredly there could be 
no sympathy for the religio-mysticism of the French 
dreamer on the part of the German. But Marx, 
with his usual penetration, saw in Saint-Simonism 
the hidden germ of a great truth, the embryo of a 
profound theory. Saint-Simon, as we have seen, had 
vaguely indicated the two ideas which were after- 
ward to be cardinal doctrines of the Marx-Engels 
Manifesto — the antagonism of classes, and the 
economic basis of political institutions. Not only 
so, but Saint-Simon's grasp of political questions, 
instanced by his advocacy, in 1815, of a triple alliance 
between England, France, and Germany, 1 appealed 
to Marx, and impressed him alike by its fine per- 
spicacity and its splendid courage. Engels, in whom, 
as stated, the working-class spirit of Chartism and the 
ideals of Owenism were blended, found in Marx a 
twin spirit. They were, indeed, — 

"Two souls with but a single thought, 
Two hearts that beat as one." 



Ill 



The Gommunist Manifesto is the first declaration 
of an International Workingmen's Party. Its fine 
peroration is a call to the workers to transcend the 

1 See F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, page 16 (Lon- 
don edition, 1892). 



60 SOCIALISM 

petty divisions of nationalism and sectarianism. — 
"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their 
chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen 
of all countries unite !" These concluding phrases 
of the Manifesto have become the shibboleths of 
millions. They are repeated with fervor by the dis- 
inherited workers of all the lands. Even in China, 
lately so rudely awakened from the slumbering peace 
of the centuries, they are cried. No sentences ever 
coined in the mint of human speech have held such 
magic power over such large numbers of men and 
women of so many diverse races. As a literary 
production, the Manifesto bears the unmistakable 
stamp of genius. 

But it is not as literature that we are to consider 
the historic document. Its importance for us lies, 
not in its form, but in its fundamental principle. 
And the fundamental principle, the essence or soul 
of the declaration, is contained in this pregnant 
summary by Engels : — 

"In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of 
economic production and exchange, and the social 
organization necessarily following from it, form the 
basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can 
be explained, the political and intellectual history of 
that epoch, that consequently the whole history of 
mankind (since primitive tribal society holding land 
in common ownership) has been a history of class 



THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" 61 

struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, 
ruling and oppressed classes." * 

Thus Engels summarizes the philosophy — as 
apart from its proposals of immediate ameliorative 
measures to constitute the political programme of the 
party — of the Manifesto, and the basis upon which 
the whole superstructure of modern, scientific Social- 
ism rests. This is the materialistic, or economic, 
conception of history which distinguishes scientific 
Socialism from all the Utopian Socialisms which 
preceded it. Socialism is henceforth a theory of 
social evolution, not a scheme of world-building; a 
spirit, not a thing. Thus twelve years before the 
appearance of The Origin of Species, nearly twenty 
years after the death of Lamarck, the authors of 
the Communist Manifesto had formulated a great 
theory of evolution, and based upon it the mightiest 
proletarian movement of history. Socialism had 
become a science instead of a dream. 

IV 

Naturally, in view of its historic role, the joint 
authorship of the Manifesto has been much discussed. 
What was the respective share of each of its creators ? 
What did Marx contribute, and what Engels? It 
may be, as Liebknecht says, an idle question, but it 

1 F. Engels, Introduction to the Communist Manifesto (English 
translation. 1888) . The italics are mine. J. S. 



62 SOCIALISM 

is a perfectly natural one. The pamphlet itself does 
not assist us; there are no internal signs pointing 
now to the hand of the one, now to the hand of the 
other. We may hazard a guess that most of the 
programme of ameliorative measures was the work of 
Engels, and perhaps the final section. For it was ever 
his task to deal with present political problems in the 
light of the fundamental theories, to the systematiza- 
tion and elucidation of which Marx was devoted. - 

Beyond this mere, and perhaps rash, conjecture, 
we have Engels' word with regard to the basal prin- 
ciple which he has summarized in the passage already 
quoted. "The Manifesto, being our joint produc- 
tion," he says, "I consider myself bound to state that 
the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus 
belongs to Marx. . . . This proposition, which, in 
my opinion, is destined to do for history what Dar- 
win's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had 
been gradually approaching for some years before 
1845. How far I had progressed toward it is best 
shown by my Condition of the Working Class in Eng- 
land. 1 But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in 
the spring 1845, he had it ready worked out, and 
put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in 
which I have stated it here." 2 

1 F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. 
See, for instance, pages 79, 80, 82, etc. 

3 Introduction to the Communist Manifesto (English edition, 
1888). 



THE " COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" 63 

Engels has lifted the veil so far, but the rest is hid- 
den. Perhaps it is well that it should be; well that 
no man should be able to say which passages came 
from the spirit of Marx ; and which from the spirit of 
Engels. In life they were inseparable, and so they 
must be in the Valhalla of history. The greatest 
political pamphlet of all time must forever bear, with 
equal honor, the names of both. Their noble friend- 
ship unites them even beyond the tomb. 

" Twin Titans ! Whom defeat ne'er bowed, 
Scarce breathing from the fray, 
Again they sound the war cry loud, 
Again is riven Labor's shroud, 
And life breathed in the clay. 
Their work ? Look round — see Freedom proud 
And confident to-day." l 

1 From Friedrich Engels, a poem by "J. L." (John Leslie), Justice 
(London), August 17, 1895. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 



Socialism, then, in the modern, scientific sense, 
is a theory of social evolution. Its hopes for the 
future rest, not upon the genius of some Utopia- 
builder, but upon the forces of historical develop- 
ment. The Socialist state will never be realized 
except as the result of economic necessity, the cul- 
mination of successive epochs of industrial evolution. 
Thus the present social system appears to the Socialist 
of to-day, not as it appeared to the Utopians, and as 
it still must appear to mere ideologist reformers, as a 
triumph of ignorance or wickedness, the reign of false 
ideas, but as a result of an age-long evolutionary 
process determined, not wholly indeed, but mainly, 
by certain methods of producing the necessities of 
life in the first place, and secondly, of effecting their 
exchange. 

Not, let it be understood, that Socialism in becoming 

scientific has become a mere mechanical theory of 

economic fatalism. The historical development, the 

social evolution, upon the laws of which the theories 
64 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 65 

of Socialism are based, is a human progress, involv- 
ing all the complex feelings, emotions, interests, 
aspirations, hopes, and fears, common to man. 1 To 
ignore this fundamental fact, as they must who 
interpret the Marx-Engels theory of history as an 
economic fatalism, is to miss the profoundest sig- 
nificance of the theory. While it is true that the 
scientific spirit destroys the idea of romantic, magic 
transformations of the social system, and the belief 
that the world may at will be re-created, re-built 
upon the plans of some Utopian architect, it still, as 
we shall see, leaves room for the human factor. They 
who accept the theory that the production of the 
material necessities of life is the main impelling force, 
the geist, of human evolution, may rightly protest 
against social injustice and wrong just as vehemently 
as any of the ideologists, and aspire just as fervently 
toward a nobler and better state. The Materialistic 
Conception of History does not involve the fatalist 
resignation summed up in the phrase, "Whatever 
is, is natural, and, therefore, right." 

II 

The idea of social evolution is admirably expressed 
in the fine phrase of Leibnitz: "The present is the 

1 For a discussion of this point, see Enrico Ferri's Socialism and 
Modern Science. Translated by R. Rives La Monte, New York, 
1900. 



66 SOCIALISM 

child of the past, but it is the parent of the future." ■ 
The great seventeenth-century philosopher was not 
indeed the first to postulate and apply to society 
that doctrine of flux, of continuity and unity, which 
we call evolution. In all ages of which record has 
been preserved to us, it has been sporadically, and 
more or less vaguely expressed. Even savages seem 
to have dimly perceived it. The saying of the 
Bechuana chief, recorded by the missionary, Casalis, 
was probably, from its epigramatic character, a 
proverb of his people. "One event is always the son 
of another," he said, — a saying strikingly like that 
of Leibnitz. 

Since the work of Lyell, Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, 
Huxley, and their numerous followers, — a brilliant 
school embracing the foremost historians and sociolo- 
gists of Europe and America, — the idea of evolution 
as a universal law has made rapid and certain progress. 
Everything changes ; nothing is immutable or eternal. 
Whatever is, whether in geology, astronomy, biology, 
or sociology, is the result of numberless, inevitable, 
related changes. The present is a phase only of a 
great transition process from what was, through what 
is, to what will be. 

The Marx-Engels theory is an exploration of the 
laws governing this process of evolution in the domain 
of human relations : an attempt to provide a key to 

1 Edward Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley, 
page 1. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 67 

the hitherto mysterious succession of changes in the 
political, juridical, and social relations and institu- 
tions. Whence, for instance, arose the institution of 
chattel slavery, so repugnant to our modern ideas of 
right and wrong ; and how shall we explain its defense 
and justification in the name of religion and morality ? 
How accoimt for the fact that what at one period of 
the world's history is regarded as perfectly natural 
and right — the practice of polygamy, for example — 
becomes abhorent at another period ; or that what is 
regarded with horror and disgust in one part of the 
world is sanctioned by the ethical codes and freely 
practiced elsewhere? Ferri gives two examples of 
this kind : the cannibalism of Central African tribes, 
and the killing of parents, as a religious duty, in 
Sumatra. 1 To reply " custom" is to beg the whole 
issue ; for customs do not exist without reason, how- 
ever difficult it may be for us to discern the reasons 
for any particular custom. To reply that these 
things are mysteries, as the old theologians did when 
the doctrine of the Trinity was questioned, is to leave 
the question unanswered and to challenge doubt and 
investigation ; the human mind abhors a mystery as 
nature abhors a vacuum. Despite Spencer's dog- 
matism, the human mind has never admitted the 
existence of the Unknowable. To explore the Un- 
known is man's universal impulse; and with each 

1 Ferri, Socialism and Modern Science, page 96. 



68 SOCIALISM 

fresh discovery the Unknown is narrowed by the 
expansion of the Known. 

The theory that ideas determine progress, that, in 
the words of Professor Richard T. Ely, 1 "all that is 
significant in human history may be traced back to 
ideas," is only true in the sense that a half truth is 
true. It is truth, nothing but the truth, but it is 
not the whole truth. For ideas have histories, too, 
and the causation of an idea must be understood 
before the idea itself can serve to explain anything. 
We must go back of the idea to the causes which 
gave it birth if we would interpret anything by it. 
We may trace the American Revolution, for example, 
back to the revolutionary ideas of the colonists, but 
that will not materially assist us to understand the 
Revolution. For that, it is necessary to trace the 
ideas themselves to their source, the economic dis- 
content of a sadly exploited people. This is the 
new spirit which illumines the works of historians 
like Green, McMaster, Morse Stephens, and others, 
who emphasize social rather than individual forces, 
and find the geist of history in social experiences and 
institutions. What has been called the "Great Man 
theory," the theory which regarded Luther as the 
creator of the Protestant Reformation, to quote only 
one example, and ignored the great economic changes 
consequent upon the break-up of feudalism and the 

1 Ely, Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, page 3. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 69 

rise of a new industrial order, long dominated our 
histories. The student, who seeks in the bulk of the 
histories written prior to, say, 1860, what he has a 
legitimate reason for seeking, a picture of the actual 
life of the people at any period, will be sadly dis- 
appointed. He will find records of wars and treaties 
of peace, royal genealogies and gossip, wildernesses 
of unrelated dates. But he will not find such careful 
accounts of the jurisprudence of the period, nor any 
hint of the economical conditions of its develop- 
ment. He will find splendid accounts of court fife, 
with its ceremonials, scandals, intrigues, and follies; 
but no such pictures of the lives of the people, their 
social conditions, and the methods of labor and 
commerce which obtained. The new spirit, in the 
development of which the materialistic conception 
of Marx and Engels has been an important creative 
influence, is concerned less with the chronicle of 
notable events and dates than with their underlying 
causes and the manner of life of the people. Had it 
no other bearing, the Marx-Engels theory, con- 
sidered solely as a contribution to the science of his- 
tory, would have been one of the greatest philosophical 
achievements of the nineteenth century. By em- 
phasizing the importance of the economic factors in 
social evolution, it has done much for economics and 
more for history. 1 

1 Cf. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History. 



70 SOCIALISM 

III 

While the Materialistic Conception of History 
bears the names of Marx and Engels, as the theory of 
organic evolution bears the names of Darwin and 
Wallace, it is not claimed that the idea had never 
before been expressed. Just as thousands of years 
before Darwin and Wallace the theory which bears 
their names had been dimly perceived, so the idea 
that economic motives dominate historical develop- 
ments had its f or eshado wings. The famous dictum 
of Aristotle, that only by the introduction of machines 
would the abolition of slavery ever be possible, is a 
conspicuous example of many anticipations of the 
theory. It is true that "In dealing with speculations 
so remote, we have to guard against reading modern 
meanings into writings produced in ages whose limita- 
tions of knowledge were serious, whose temper and 
standpoint are wholly alien to our own," l but the 
Aristotelian saying admits of no other interpretation. 
It is clearly a recognition of the fact that the supreme 
politico-social institution of the time depended upon 
hand labor. In later times, the idea of a direct con- 
nection between economic causes and legal and 
political institutions reappears in the works of various 
writers. Professor Seligman 2 quotes from Harring- 

1 Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution from T hales to Hurley, page 8. 

2 Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, page 50. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 71 

ton's Oceana the argument that the prevailing form 
of government depends upon the conditions of land 
tenure, and the extent of its monopolization. Saint- 
Simon, too, as already stated, 1 taught that political 
institutions depend upon economic conditions. But 
it is to Marx and Engels that we owe the first formu- 
lation of what had hitherto been but a suggestion 
into a definite theory, and the beginnings of a litera- 
ture, now of considerable proportions, dealing with 
history from its standpoint. 

A word as to the designation of the theory. Its 
authors gave it the name of " historical materialism, " 
and it has been said that the name is for various 
reasons unfortunately chosen. The two leading 
American exponents of the theory, Professor Selig- 
man and Mr. Ghent, have expressed that conviction 
in very definite terms. The last-named writer 
bases his objection to the name on the ground that 
it is repellent to many persons who associate the 
word " materialism" with the philosophy "that mat- 
ter is the only substance, and that matter and its 
motions constitute the universe." 2 That is an old 
objection, and undoubtedly contains much truth; it 
is interesting in connection therewith to read Engels' 
sarcastic comment upon it in the Introduction to his 
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. The objection of 

1 See page 43. 

2 W. J. Ghent, Mass and Class, page 9. 



72 SOCIALISM 

Professor Seligman is based upon another ground 
entirely. He impugns its accuracy. "The theory 
which ascribes all changes in society to the influence 
of climate, or to the character of the fauna and flora, 
is materialistic/' he says, "and yet has little in com- 
mon with the doctrine here discussed. The doctrine 
we have to deal with is not only materialistic, but 
also economic in character ; and the better phrase 
is . . . the ' economic interpretation' of history." 1 
For this reason he discards the name given to the 
theory by its authors and adopts the luminous phrase 
of Thorold Rogers. 2 By French and Italian writers 
the term "economic determinism" has long been used 
and it has been adopted to some extent in this country 
by Socialist writers. But this term also Professor 
Seligman rejects, for the perfectly valid reason that it 
exaggerates the theory, and gives it, by implication, 
a fatalistic character, conveying, as it does, the idea 
that economic influence is the sole determining factor — 
a view which its authors specifically repudiated. 

Many persons have doubtless been deceived into 
believing that the theory involves the denial of all 
influence to idealistic or spiritual factors; and the 
assumption that economic forces alone determine the 
course of historical development. That is due 
partly, no doubt, to the overemphasis placed upon 

1 Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, page 4. 

2 Without credit, by the way, 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 73 

it by its founders — a common experience of new 
doctrines — and, above all, the exaggerations of too 
zealous, unrestrained disciples. There is a wise say- 
ing of Schiller's which suggests the spirit in which 
these exaggerations of a great truth — exaggerations 
by which it becomes falsehood — should be regarded : 
" Rarely do we reach truth, except through "ex- 
tremes — we must have foolishness . . . even to 
exhaustion, before we arrive at the beautiful goal of 
calm wisdom." * When it is contended that the 
" Civil War was at the bottom a struggle between 
two economic principles," 2 we have the presentation 
of an important truth, the key to the proper under- 
standing of a great event. But when that important 
fact is exaggerated and torn from its legitimate place 
to suit the propaganda of a theory, and we are asked 
to believe that Garrison, Love joy, and other abo- 
litionists, were inspired solely by economic motives, 
that the urge of human freedom did not enter their 
souls, we are forced to reject it. But let it be clearly 
understood that it forms no part of the theory, that 
it is even expressly denied in the very terms of the 
theory, and that its founders took every chance of 
repudiating such monstrous perversions of their 
statements. 
In one of the very earliest of his writings upon the 

1 Schiller, Philosophical Letters, Preamble. 

2 Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History, page 86. 



74 SOCIALISM 

subject, some comments upon the philosophy of 
Ludwig Feuerbach, written in 1845, and intended to 
form the basis of a work upon the subject, we find 
Marx insisting that man is not a mere automaton, 
driven irresistibly by blind economic forces. He says : 
"The materialistic doctrine, that men are the products 
of conditions and education, different men, there- 
fore, the products of other conditions and changed 
education, forgets that circumstances may be altered 
by men, and that the educator has himself to be edu- 
cated." l Thus early we see the master taking a 
position entirely at variance with those of his dis- 
ciples who would claim that the human factor has no 
place in historical development. Marx recognizes the 
human character of the problem and the futility of 
attempting to reduce all the processes of history and 
human progress to one sole basic cause. And in no 
instance, so far as I am aware, has Marx or his col- 
league attempted to do this. In another place, 
Marx contends that "men make their own history, 
but they make it not of their own accord or under 
self-chosen conditions, but under given and trans- 
mitted conditions. The tradition of all dead genera- 
tions weighs like a mountain upon the brain of the 
living." 2 Here, again, the influence of the human 

1 Appendix to F. Engels' Feuerbach, the Roots of the Socialist 
Philosophy, translated by Austin Lewis, 1903. 

2 Quoted from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Marx, by Seligman, 
page 42. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 75 

will is not denied, though its limitations are indicated. 
This is the application to social man of the theory 
of limitations of the will commonly accepted as 
applying to individuals. Man is only a freewill 
agent within certain bounds. In a given contingency, 
I may be "free" to act in a certain manner, or to 
refrain from so acting. I may take my choice, in 
the one direction or the other, entirely free, to all 
appearances, from restraining or compelling in- 
fluences; thus, I have acted upon my "will." But 
what factors formed my will? What circumstances 
determined my decision? Perhaps fear, or shame, 
or pride, perhaps tendencies inherited from the past. 
Engels admits that the economic factor in evolu- 
tion has been unduly emphasized. He says: "Marx 
and I are partly responsible for the fact that the 
younger men have sometimes laid more stress on 
the economic side than it deserves. In meeting the 
attacks of our opponents, it was necessary for us to 
emphasize the dominant principle denied by them; 
and we did not always have the time, place, or 
opportunity to let the other factors which were con- 
cerned in the mutual action and reaction get their 
deserts." 1 In another letter, 2 he says: "According 
to the materialistic view of history, the factor which 



1 Quoted from The Sozialistische Akademiker, 1895, by Seligman : 
The Economic Interpretation of History, page 142. 

2 Idem, page 143. 



76 SOCIALISM 

is in last instance decisive in history is the production 
and reproduction of actual life. More than this 
neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But when 
any one distorts this so as to read that the economic 
factor is the sole element, he converts the state- 
ment into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. 
The economic condition is the basis; but the various 
elements of the superstructure — the political forms 
of the class contests, and their results, the constitu- 
tions — the legal forms, and also all the reflexes of 
these actual contests in the brains of the participants, 
the political, legal, philosophical theories, the re- 
ligious views ... — all these exert an influence on 
the development of the historical struggles, and, in 
many instances, determine their form." 

It is evident, therefore, that the doctrine does not 
imply economic fatalism. It does not deny that 
ideals influence historical developments and in- 
dividual conduct. It does not deny that men may, 
and often do, act in accordance with the promptings 
of noble impulses, when their material interests 
would lead them to act otherwise. We have a con- 
spicuous example of this in Marx's own life, his 
splendid devotion to the cause of the workers through 
years of terrible poverty and hardship when he 
might have chosen wealth and fame. Thus we are 
to understand the materialistic theory as teaching, 
not that history is determined by economic forces 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 77 

only, but that in human evolution the chief factors 
are social factors, and that these factors in turn are 
mainly molded by economic circumstances. 1 

This, then, is the basis of the Socialist philosophy, 
which Engels regards as "destined to do for history 
what Darwin's theory has done for biology." Marx 
himself made a similar comparison. 2 Marx was, so 
Liebknecht tells us, one of the first to recognize the 
importance of Darwin's investigations from a socio- 
logical point of view. His first elaborate treat- 
ment of the materialistic theory, in A Contribution 
to the Critique of Political Economy, appeared in 1859, 
the year in which The Origin of Species appeared. 
"We spoke for months of nothing else but Darwin, 
and the revolutionizing power of his scientific con- 
quests," 3 says Liebknecht. Darwin, however, had 
little knowledge of political economy, as he acknowl- 
edged in a letter to Marx, thanking the latter for a 
copy of his Das Capital. "I heartily wish that I 
possessed a greater knowledge of the deep and impor- 
tant subject of economic questions, which would make 
me a more worthy recipient of your gift," he wrote. 4 

1 I have not attempted to give here a history of the development 
of the theory, and only in a general way have I attempted to explain 
it. For a more minute study of the theory, I must refer the reader 
to the writings of Engels, Seligman, Ghent, Ferri, Bax, and others 
quoted in these pages. 

2 Capital, Vol. I, page 367 n. 

8 Liebknecht, Memoirs of Karl Marx, page 91. 

4 Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, A Comparison, by Edward 
Aveling, London, 1897. 



78 SOCIALISM 

IV 

The test of such a theory must lie in its application. 
Let us, then, apply the materialistic principle, first 
to a specific event, and then to the great sweep of the 
historic drama. Perhaps no single event has more 
profoundly impressed the imaginations of men, or 
filled a more important place in our histories, than the 
discovery of America by Columbus. In the school- 
books for generations, this great event figures as a 
splendid adventure, arising out of a romantic dream. 
But the facts are, as we know, far otherwise. 1 In the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were numerous 
and well-frequented routes from Hindustan, that 
vast storehouse of treasure from which Europe drew 
its riches. Along these routes cities flourished. 
There were the great ports, Licia in the Levant, 
Trebizond on the Black Sea, and Alexandria. From 
these ports, Venetian and Genoese traders bore the 
produce over the passes of the Alps to the Upper 
Danube and the Rhine. Here it was a source of 
wealth to the cities along the waterways, from 
Ratisbon and Nuremburg, to Bruges and Antwerp. 
Even the slightest acquaintance with the history of 
the Middle Ages must show the importance of these 
cities. 

1 See Thorold Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History, 
second edition, 1891, pages 10-12. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 79 

When all these routes save the Egyptian were 
closed by the hordes of savages which infested Central 
Asia, it became an easy matter for the Moors in Africa, 
and the Turks in Europe, to exact immense revenues 
from the Eastern trade, solely through their monopoly 
of the route of transit. The Turks were securely 
seated at Constantinople, threatening to advance into 
the heart of Europe, and building up an immense 
military system out of the taxes imposed upon the 
trade of Europe with the East — a military power, 
which, in less than a quarter of a century, enabled 
Selim I to conquer Mesopotamia and the holy towns 
of Arabia, and to annex Egypt. 1 It became neces- 
sary, then, to find a new route to India; and it was 
this great economic necessity which first set Colum- 
bus thinking of a pathway to India over the Western 
Sea. It was this great economic necessity which 
induced Ferdinand and Isabella to support his 
adventurous plan, — in a word, without detracting 
in any manner from the splendid genius of Columbus, 
or from the romance of his great voyage of discovery, 
we see that, fundamentally, it was the economic 
interest of Europe which gave birth to the one and 
made the other possible. The same explanation 
applies to the voyage of Vasco da Gama, six years 

1 I do not attempt to develop here the serious consequences of 
these events to Europe. See The Economic Interpretation of His- 
tory, by Thorold Rogers, Chapter I, page 8, for a brief account of this. 



80 SOCIALISM 

later, which resulted in finding a way to India over 

the southeast course by way of the Cape of Good Hope. 

Kipling asks in his ballad "The British Flag" : — 

"And what should they know of England, who only England 
know?" 

There is a profound truth in the defiant line, a truth 
which applies equally to America or any other country. 
The present is inseparable from the past. We cannot 
understand one epoch without reference to its prede- 
cessors; we cannot understand the history of the 
United States unless we first seek the key in the his- 
tory of Europe ; of England and France, in particular. 
At the very threshold, to understand how the heroic 
navigator came to discover the vast continent of which 
the United States is part, we must pause to study the 
economic conditions of Europe which impelled the 
adventurous voyage, and led to the finding of a great 
continent stretching across the ocean path. Such a 
view of history does not rob it of its romance, but 
rather adds to it. Surely, the wonderful linking of 
circumstances, — the demand for spices and silks to 
minister to the fine tastes of aristocratic Europe, 
the growth of the trade with the East Indies, the 
grasping greed of Moor and Turk, — all playing a role 
in the great drama of which the discovery of America 
is but a scene, is infinitely more fascinating than the 
latter event detached from its historic setting! 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 81 

It is not easy in the compass of a few pages to give 
an intelligent view of the main currents of history. 
The sketch here introduced — not without hesitation 
— is an endeavor to state the Socialist concept of the 
course of evolution in brief outline; to indicate the 
principal economic causes which have determined 
that course, and to direct the inquiring reader to 
some of the more important sources of information 
accessible to the average reader knowing no language 
but English. 

It is now generally admitted that primitive man 
lived under Communism. Lewis H. Morgan 1 has 
calculated that if the life of the human race be assumed 
to have covered one hundred thousand years, at least 
ninety-five thousand years were spent in a crude, 
tribal Communism, in which private property was 
practically unknown, and in which the only ethic was 
devotion to tribal interests, and the only crime an- 
tagonism to tribal interests. Under this social system 
the means of making wealth was in the hands of the 
tribes, or gens, and the distribution was likewise 
socially arranged. Between the different tribes war- 
fare was constant; but in the tribe itself there was 
cooperation and not struggle. This fact is of tre- 
mendous importance in view of the criticisms which 
have been directed to the Socialist philosophy from 
the so-called Darwinian point of view — the theory 

1 Quoted by Hyndman, Economics of Socialism, page 5. 



82 SOCIALISM 

that competition and struggle is the law of life ; that 
what Professor Huxley calls "the Hobbesial war of 
each against all," is the normal state of existence. 
I say the " so-called Darwinian theory" advisedly, for 
the struggle for existence as the law of evolution has 
been exaggerated out of all likeness to the conception 
of Darwin himself. In The Descent of Man, for in- 
stance, Darwin raises the point under review, and 
shows how, in many animal societies, the struggle for 
existence is replaced by cooperation for existence, and 
how that substitution results in the development of 
faculties which secure to the species the best condi- 
tions for survival. " Those communities," he says, 
" which included the greatest number of the most 
sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear 
the greatest number of offspring." * Despite these 
instances, and the warning of Darwin himself that the 
term struggle for existence should not be too narrowly 
interpreted or overrated, his followers, instead of 
broadening it according to the master's suggestions, 
narrowed it still more. This is almost invariably 
the fate of theories which deal with human relations, 
perhaps it would be equally true to say of all theories. 
The exaggerations of Malthus' law of population is 
a case in point. The Marx-Engels materialistic con- 
ception of history, is, we have seen, another. 
Kropotkin, among others, has developed the theory 

1 Darwin, The Descent of Man, second edition, page 163. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 83 

that " though there is an immense amount of warfare 
and extermination going on amidst various species, 
and especially amidst various classes of animals, 
there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even 
more, of mutual support, mutual aid, mutual defense 
amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at 
least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a 
law of nature as mutual struggle. ... If we resort 
to an indirect test, and ask nature: 'Who are the 
fittest: those who are continually at war with each 
other, or those who support one another?' we at 
once see that those animals which acquire habits of 
mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have 
more chances to survive, and they attain, in their 
respective classes, the highest development of in- 
telligence and bodily organization. If the number- 
less facts which can be brought forward to support 
this view are taken into account, we may safely say 
that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as 
mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it 
most probably has a far greater importance, inas- 
much as it favors the development of such habits 
and characters as insure the maintenance and further 
development of the species, together with the greatest 
amount of welfare and enjoyment of fife for the in- 
dividual, with the least waste of energy." * 
From the lowest forms of animal life up to the 

1 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, pages 5-6. 



84 SOCIALISM- 

highest, man, this law proves to be operative. It is 
not denied that there is competition for food, for life, 
within the species, human and other. But that com- 
petition is not usual; it arises out of unusual and 
special conditions. There are instances of hunger- 
maddened mothers tearing food away from their 
children; men drifting at sea have fought for water 
and food, as beasts fight; but these are not normal 
conditions of life. " Happily enough," says Kropot- 
kin again, " competition is not the rule either in the 
animal world or in mankind. It is limited among 
animals to exceptional periods. . . . Better con- 
ditions are created by the elimination of competition 
by means of mutual aid and mutual support." ' 
This is the voice of science now that we have passed 
through the extremes and arrived at the " beautiful 
goal of calm wisdom." Competition is not, in the 
verdict of modern science, the law of life, but of death. 
Strife is not nature's law of progress. 

Anything more important for the purposes of our 
present inquiry than this verdict of science it would 
be difficult to imagine. Men have for so long be- 
lieved and declared struggle and competition to be 
the "law of nature," and opposed Socialism on the 
ground of its supposed antagonism to that law, that 
this new conception of the law comes as a vindica- 
tion of the Socialist position. The naturalist testifies 

1 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, page 74. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 85 

to the universality of the principle of cooperation 
throughout the animal world, and the historian to its 
universality over the greatest period of man's his- 
tory. Thus the present tendencies toward combina- 
tion and away from competition in industry and 
commerce appear as the fulfilling of a great universal 
law — and the vain efforts of men to stop that process, 
by legislation, boycotts, and divers other methods, 
appear as efforts to set aside nature's immutable law. 
Like so many Canutes, they bid the tides halt, and, 
like Canute's, their commands are vain and mocked 
by the unheeding tides. 

Under Communism, then, man lived for many 
thousands of years. As far back as we can go into 
the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find evidences 
of this. All the great authorities, Morgan, Maine, 
Lubbock, Taylor, Bachofen, and many others, agree 
in this. And under this Communism all the great 
fundamental inventions were evolved, as Morgan 
and others have shown. The wheel, the potter's 
wheel, the lever, the stencil plate, the sail, the rudder, 
the loom, were all evolved under Communism in its 
various stages. So, too, the cultivation of cereals 
for food, the smelting of metals, the domestication of 
animals, — to which we owe so much, and on which 
we still so largely depend, — were all introduced under 
Communism. Even in our own day there have been 
found abundant survivals of this Communism among 



86 SOCIALISM 

primitive peoples. I need only mention here the 
Bantu tribes of Africa, whose splendid organization 
astonished the British, and the Eskimos. It is now 
possible to trace with a fair amount of certainty the 
progress of man through various stages of Communism, 
from the unconscious Communism of the nomad to 
the consciously organized and directed Communism 
of the most developed tribes, right up to the threshold 
of civilization, when private property takes the place 
of common, tribal property, and economic classes 
appear. 1 



Private property, other than that personal owner- 
ship and use of things, such as weapons and tools, 
which involves no class or caste domination, and is 
an integral feature of all forms of Communism, first 
appears in the ownership of man by man. Slavery, 
strange as it may seem, is directly traceable to tribal 
Communism, and first appears as a tribal institution. 
When one tribe made war upon another, its efforts 
were directed to the killing of as many of its enemies 
as possible. Cannibal tribes killed their foes for food, 
rarely or never killing their fellow-tribesmen for that 
purpose. Non-cannibalistic tribes killed their foes 

1 Cf. Ancient Society, by Lewis H. Morgan, and The Origin of the 
Family, Private Property, and the State, by Friedrich Engels. 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 87 

merely to get rid of them. But when the power of 
man over the forces of external nature had reached 
that point in its development where it became rela- 
tively easy for a man to produce more than was neces- 
sary for his own maintenance, the custom arose of 
making captives of enemies and setting them to work. 
A foe captured had thus an economic value to the 
tribe; either he could be set to work directly, his 
surplus product going into the tribal treasury, or he 
could be used to relieve some of his captors from 
other necessary duties, thus enabling them to pro- 
duce more than would otherwise be possible, the effect 
being the same in the end. The property of the tribe 
at first, slaves become at a later stage private property 
— probably through the institution of tribal distribu- 
tion of wealth. Cruel, revolting, and vile as slavery 
appears to our modern sense — especially the earlier 
forms of slavery, before the body of legislation, and, 
not less important, sentiment, which surrounded it 
later arose — it still was a step forward, a distinct 
advance upon the older customs of cannibalism or 
wholesale slaughter. 

Nor was it a progressive step only on the humani- 
tarian side. It had other, profounder consequences 
from the evolutionary point of view. It made a 
leisured class possible, and provided the only condi- 
tions under which art, philosophy, and jurisprudence 
could be evolved. The secret of Aristotle's saying, 



88 SOCIALISM 

that only by the invention of machines would the 
abolition of slavery ever be possible, lies in his recog- 
nition of the fact that the labor of slaves alone made 
possible the devotion of a class of men to the pursuit 
of knowledge instead of to the production of the 
primal necessities of life. The Athens of Pericles, 
for example, with all its varied forms of culture, its art 
and its philosophy, was a semi-communism of a caste 
above, resting upon a basis of slave labor underneath. 
And that is true of all the so-called ancient democ- 
racies of civilization. 

The private ownership of wealth producers and 
their products made private exchange inevitable; 
individual ownership of land took the place of com- 
munal ownership, and a monetary system was in- 
vented. Here, then, in the private ownership of 
land and laborer, private production and exchange 
for profit, we have the economic factors which caused 
the great revolts of antiquity, and led to that con- 
centration of wealth into few hands with its result- 
ing mad luxury and widespread proletarian misery, 
which conspired to the overthrow of Greek and 
Roman civilization. The study of those relentless 
economic forces which led to the break-up of Roman 
civilization is important as showing how chattel 
slavery became modified and the slave to be regarded 
as a serf, a servant tied to the soil. The lack of 
adequate production, the crippling of commerce by 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 89 

the hordes of corrupt officials, the overburdening of 
the agricultural estates with slaves so that agricul- 
ture became profitless, the crushing out of free labor 
by slave labor, and the rise of a class of wretched free- 
men proletarians, these, and other kindred causes, 
led to the breaking up of the great estates; the dis- 
missal of superfluous slaves, in many cases, and the 
partial enfranchisement of others by making them 
hereditary tenants, paying a fixed rent in shares of 
their product — here we have the embryo of the later 
feudal system. It was a revolution, this transforma- 
tion of the social system of Rome, of infinitely greater 
importance than the sporadic risings of a few thousand 
slaves. Yet, such is the lack of perspective which 
historians have shown, it is given a far less important 
place in the histories than the risings in question. 
Slavery, chattel slavery, died because it had ceased 
to be profitable ; serf labor arose because it was more 
profitable. Slave labor was economically impossible, 
and the labor of free men was morally impossible; 
it had, thanks to the slave system, become regarded 
as a degradation. In the words of Engels: "This 
brought the Roman world into a blind ally from 
which it could not escape. . . . There was no other 
help but a complete revolution." 1 

The invading barbarians made the revolution 

1 F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the 
State, translated by Ernest Untermann, page 182. 



90 SOCIALISM 

complete. By the poor freeman proletarians who 
had been selling their children into slavery, the bar- 
barians were welcomed. Misery is like opulence in 
that it has no patriotism. Many of the proletarian 
freemen had fled to the districts of the barbarians, 
and feared nothing so much as a return to Roman 
rule; what, then, should the proletariat care for the 
overthrow of the Roman state ? And how much less 
the slaves, whose condition, generally speaking, could 
not possibly change for the worse ? The proletariat 
and the slave could join in saying, as men have 
said thousands of times in circumstances of despera- 
tion : — 

"Our fortunes may be better; they can be no worse." 

VI 

Feudalism is the essential politico-economic system 
of the Middle Ages. Obscure as its origin is, and in- 
definite as the date of its first appearances, there can 
be no doubt whatever that the break-up of the Roman 
system, and the modification of the existing form of 
slavery, constituted the most important of its sources. 
Whether, as some writers have contended, the feudal 
system of land tenure and serfdom is traceable to 
Asiatic origins, being adopted by the ruling class of 
Rome in the clays of the economic disintegration of the 
empire, or whether it rose spontaneously out of the 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 91 

Roman conditions, matters little to us. Whatever 
its archaeological interest, it does not affect the 
narrower scope of our present inquiry whether 
economic necessity caused the adoption of an alien 
system of land tenure and agricultural production, or 
whether economic necessity caused the creation of a 
new system. The central fact is the same in either 
case. That period of history which we call the Mid- 
dle Ages covers a span of well-nigh a thousand years. 
If we arbitrarily date its beginning from the success- 
ful invasion of Rome by the barbarians in the early 
part of the fifth century, and its ending with the final 
development of the craft guilds in the middle of the 
fourteenth century, we have a sufficiently exact 
measure of the time during which feudalism developed, 
flourished, and declined. There are few things more 
difficult than the bounding of historical epochs by 
exact dates; just as the ripening of the wheat fields 
comes almost imperceptibly, so that the farmer can 
say when the wheat is ripe yet cannot tell when the 
ripening occurred, so with the epochs into which his- 
tory divides itself. There is the unripe state and the 
ripe, but no chasm yawns between them; they are 
merged together. We speak of the "end" of chattel 
slavery, and the "rise" of feudalism, therefore, in 
this wide, general sense. As a matter of fact, chattel 
slavery survived to some extent for centuries, exist- 
ing alongside of the new form of servitude; and its 



92 SOCIALISM 

disappearance took place , not simultaneously through- 
out the civilized world, but at varying intervals. 
Likewise, too, there is a vast difference between the 
first, crude, ill-defined forms of feudalism and its sub- 
sequent development. 

The theory of feudalism is "the divine right of 
kings." God is the Supreme Lord of all the earth, 
the kings are His vice regents, devolving their au- 
thority in turn upon whomsoever they will. At the 
base of the whole superstructure was the serf, his 
relation to his master differing only in degree, though 
in material degree, from that of the chattel slave. 
He might be, and often was, as brutally ill-treated 
as the slave before him had been ; he might be ill fed 
and ill housed ; his wife or daughters might be rav- 
ished by his master or his master's sons. Yet, withal, 
his condition was better than that of the slave. He 
could maintain his family life in an independent 
household; he possessed some rights, chief of which 
perhaps was the right to labor for himself. Having 
his own allotment of land, he was in a much larger 
sense a human being. Compelled to render so many 
days' service to his lord, tilling the soil, clearing the 
forest, quarrying stone, and doing domestic work, 
he was permitted to devote a certain, sometimes an 
equal, number of days to work for his own benefit. 
Not only so, but the service the lord rendered him, 
in protecting him and his family from the lawless and 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 93 

violent robber hordes which infested the country, 
was considerable. 

The feudal estate, or manor, was an industrial 
whole, self-dependent, and having few essential ties 
with the outside world. While the barons and their 
retainers, the lords, thanes, and freemen, enjoyed a 
certain rude plenty, some of the richer barons and 
lords enjoying a considerable amount of luxury and 
splendor, the villein and his sons tilled the soil, reaped 
the harvests, felled trees for fuel, built the houses, 
raised the necessary domestic animals, and killed the 
wild animals; his wife and daughters spun the flax, 
carded the wool, made the homespun clothing, 
brewed the mead, and gathered the grapes which they 
made into wine. There was little real dependence 
upon the outside world except for articles of luxury. 

Such was the basic economic institution of feudal- 
ism. But alongside of the feudal estate with its serf 
labor, there were the free laborers, no longer regarding 
labor as shameful and degrading. These free labor- 
ers were the handicraftsmen and free peasants — 
the former soon organizing themselves into guilds. 
There was a specialization of labor, but, as yet, little 
division. Each man worked at a particular craft 
and exchanged his individual products. The free 
craftsman would exchange his product with the free 
peasant, and sometimes his trade extended to the 
feudal manor. The guild was at once his master and 



94 SOCIALISM 

protector; rigid in its rules, strict in its surveillance 
of its members, it was strong and effective as a 
protector against the impositions and invasions of 
feudal barons and their retainers. Division of labor 
first appears in its simplest form, the association of 
independent individual workers for mutual advantage, 
sharing their products on an equal basis. This simple 
cooperation involved no social change; that came 
later with the development of the workshop system, 
and the division of labor upon a definite, predetermined 
plan. Men specialized now in the making of parts of 
things; no man could say of a finished product, "This 
is mine, for I have made it." Production had be- 
come a social function. 

VII 

At first, in its simple beginnings, the cooperation 
of various producers in one great workshop did not 
involve any general or far-reaching changes in the 
system of exchange. But as the new methods spread, 
and it became the custom for one or two wealthy 
individuals to provide the workshop and necessary 
tools of production, the product of the combined 
labor of the workers being appropriated in its en- 
tirety by the owners of the agencies of production, 
who paid the workers a money wage representing less 
than the actual value of their product, and based 



THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 95 

upon the cost of their subsistence, the whole economic 
system was once more revolutionized. The custom 
of working for wages, hitherto rare and exceptional, 
became general and customary; individual produc- 
tion for use, either directly or through the medium 
of personal exchange, was superseded by social pro- 
duction for private profit. The wholesale exchange 
of social products for private gain took the place of 
the personal exchange of commodities. The differ- 
ence between the total cost of the production of com- 
modities, including the wages of the producers, and 
their exchange value — determined at this stage 
by the cost of producing similar commodities by in- 
dividual labor — constituted the share of the capital- 
ist, his profit, and the objective of production. The 
new system did not spring up spontaneously and full- 
fledged; like feudalism, it was a growth, a develop- 
ment of existing forms. And just as chattel slavery 
lingered on after the rise of the feudal regime, so the 
old methods of individual production and direct 
exchange of commodities for personal use lingered 
on in places and isolated industries long after the 
rise of the system of wage-paid labor and production 
for profit. But the old methods of production and 
exchange gradually became rare and well-nigh obso- 
lete. In accordance with the stern economic law 
that Marx afterward developed so clearly, the man 
whose methods of production, including his tools, 



96 SOCIALISM 

are less efficient and economical than those of his 
fellows, thereby making his labor more expensive, 
must either adapt himself to the new conditions or 
fall in the struggle which ensues. The triumph of 
the new system of capitalist production, with its far 
greater efficiency arising from associated production 
upon a plan of specialized division of labor, was, 
therefore, but a question of time. The class of wage- 
workers thus gradually increased in numbers; as 
men found that they were unable to compete with 
the new methods, they accepted the inevitable 
and adapted themselves to the new conditions. 



CHAPTER V 

CAPITALISM AND THE LAW OF CONCENTRATION 



Such was the mode of the first stage of capitalistic 
production, in which a permanent wage-working class 
was formed, new and larger markets were developed, 
and production for sale and profit became the rule, 
instead of the exception as formerly when men pro- 
duced primarily for use and sold only their surplus 
products. A new form of class division arose out of 
this economic soil. Instead of being bound to the 
land as the serfs had been, the wage-workers were 
bound to their tools. They were not bound to a 
single master, they were not branded on the cheek, 
but they were dependent upon the industrial lords. 
Thus it was that economic mastery gradually shifted 
from the land-owning class to the class of manufac- 
turers. The political and social history of the Middle 
Ages is largely the record of the struggle for supremacy 
between these two classes. That is the central fact 
of the Protestant Reformation and of the Cromwellian 
Commonwealth. 

h 97 



98 SOCIALISM 

The second stage of capitalism begins with the 
birth of the machine age; the great mechanical in- 
ventions of the latter half of the seventeenth century, 
and the resulting industrial revolution, the salient 
features of which we have already traced. That revo- 
lution centered in England, whose proud but, from 
all other points of view than the commercial, foolish 
boast for a full century it was to be the " workshop 
of the world." The new methods of production, and 
the development of trade with India and the colonies 
and the United States of America, providing a vast 
and apparently almost unlimited market, a tre- 
mendous rivalry was created among the people of 
England, tauntingly, but with less originality than 
bitterness, designated "a nation of shopkeepers" by 
Napoleon the First. Competition flourished, and 
commerce grew under its mighty urge. Quite natur- 
ally, therefore, competition came to be universally 
regarded as the "life of trade" and the one supreme 
law of progress by British economists and statesmen. 
The economic conditions of the time fostered a sturdy 
individualism on the one hand, which, on the other 
hand, they as surely destroyed; resulting in the 
paradox of a nation of theoretical individualists 
becoming, through its poor laws, and more especially 
its vast body of industrial legislation, a nation of 
practical collectivists. 

The third and last stage of capitalism is charac- 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 99 

terized by new forms of industrial administration and 
control. Concentration of industry, and the elimi- 
nation of competition, are the distinguishing features 
of this stage. When, half a century ago, the Socialists 
predicted an era of industrial concentration and 
monopoly as the outcome of the competitive struggles 
of the time, their prophecies were mocked and de- 
rided. Yet, at this distance, it is easy to see what the 
Socialists were foresighted enough to foresee, that 
competition carried in its bosom the germs of its 
own inevitable destruction. In words which, as 
Professor Ely justly says, 1 seem to many, even non- 
Socialists, like a prophecy, Karl Marx argued more 
than half a century ago that the business units in 
production would continuously increase in magni- 
tude, until at last monopoly emerged from the com- 
petitive struggle. This monopoly becoming a shackle 
upon the system under which it has grown up, and 
thus becoming incompatible with capitalist con- 
ditions, socialization must, according to Marx, 
naturally follow. 2 

II 

With the last-named phase of the great Socialist's 
prediction we are not for the moment concerned. 

1 Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, by R. T. Ely, page 
95. 

2 See Capital, English edition, page 789. 

Lore 



100 SOCIALISM 

That the predicted growth of monopoly out of the 
competitive struggle has been abundantly realized 
is the important point for our present study. Not- 
withstanding the many controversies which have 
arisen, both within and without the ranks of the 
followers of Marx, it is generally conceded that the 
control of the means of production is being rapidly 
concentrated into the hands of small and smaller 
groups of capitalists. In recent years the increase 
in the number of industrial establishments has not 
kept pace with the increase in the number of workers 
employed, the increase of capital, or the value of the 
products manufactured. Not only do we find small 
groups of men controlling certain industries, but a 
selective process can be observed at work, giving to 
the same groups of men control of various industries 
otherwise utterly unrelated. 

In the earlier stages of the movement toward con- 
centration and trustification, it was possible to classify 
the leading capitalists according to the industries 
with which they were identified. One set of capital- 
ists, "Oil Kings," controlled the oil industry; another 
set, " Steel Kings," controlled the iron and steel in- 
dustry; another set, "Coal Barons," controlled the 
coal industry, and so on throughout the industrial 
and commercial life of the nation. To-day, all this 
has been changed. An examination of the Directory 
of Directors shows that the same men control varied 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 101 

enterprises. The Oil King is at the same time a 
Steel King, a Coal Baron, a Railway Magnate, and so 
on. The men who comprise the Standard Oil group 
are found to control hundreds of other companies. 
They include in the scope of their directorate, bank- 
ing, insurance, mining, real estate, railroad and 
steamship lines, gas companies, sugar, coffee, cotton, 
and tobacco companies, and a heterogeneous host of 
other concerns. Not only so, but these same men 
are large holders of foreign investments. In all the 
great European countries, as well as India, Australia, 
Africa, Asia, and the South American countries, they 
hold large investments, while foreign capitalists 
similarly, but to a much less extent, hold large in- 
vestments in American companies. Thus, the con- 
centration of industrial control, through its finance, 
has become interindustrial and is rapidly becoming 
international. In this way the predictions of the 
Socialists are becoming fulfilled. 

Ill 

During the last few years there have been many 
criticisms of the Marxian theory, aiming to show that 
this concentration has been, and is, much more 
apparent than real. Some of the most important of 
these criticisms have come from within the ranks 
of the Socialists themselves, and have been widely 



102 SOCIALISM 

exploited as portending the disintegration of the 
Socialist movement. Inter alia it may be remarked 
here that a certain fretfulness of temper characterizes 
most of the critics of the Socialist movement. Ad- 
herence to the teachings of Marx is pronounced by 
them to be a sign of the bondage of the movement and 
its intellectual leaders to the Marxian "fetish," and 
every recognition of the human fallibility of Marx 
by a Socialist thinker is hailed as a sure portent of 
a split among the Socialists. Yet the most serious 
criticisms of Marx have come from the ranks of his 
followers. It is perhaps only another sign of the 
intellectual bankruptcy of the academic opposition 
to Socialism that this should be so. 

Of course, Marx was human and fallible. If 
Capital had never been written, there would still 
have been a Socialist movement; and if it could be 
destroyed by criticism, the Socialist movement would 
remain. Socialism is a product of economic con- 
ditions, not of a theory or a book. Capital is the 
intellectual explanation of Socialism, not its cause. 
Much more than their opponents, Socialists have 
recognized this, and it can be said with absolute con- 
fidence that they have been much more independent 
in their attitude toward the great work of Marx than 
most of their critics have been. 

It cannot be fairly said that the sum of criticism 
has seriously affected the general Marxian theory. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 103 

So far as that criticism has touched the subject we 
are discussing, it has been almost pitifully weak, and 
the furore it has created seems almost pathetic. The 
main results of this criticism may be briefly summarized 
as follows: First, in industry, the persistence, and 
even increase, of petty industries; second, in agri- 
culture, the failure of large-scale farming, and the 
decrease of the average farm acreage ; third, in retail 
trade, the persistence of the small stores, despite the 
growth in size and number of the great department 
stores. At first sight, and stated in this manner, it 
would seem as if these conclusions, if justified by 
facts, involved a serious and far-reaching criticism of 
the Socialist theory of a universal tendency toward 
the concentration of industry and commerce into 
units of ever increasing magnitude. 

Upon closer examination, however, these conclu- 
sions, their accuracy admitted, are seen to involve 
no very serious or damaging criticism of the Socialist 
theory. To the superficial observer, the mere in- 
crease in the number of industrial establishments 
appears a much more important matter than to the 
careful student, who is not easily deceived by ap- 
pearances. The student sees that while petty in- 
dustries undoubtedly do increase, the increase of 
large industries employing many more workers and 
much larger capitals is vastly greater. Furthermore, 
he sees what the superficial observer constantly over- 



104 SOCIALISM 

looks, that these petty industries are unstable and 
transient, being constantly absorbed by the larger 
industrial combinations, or crushed out of existence, 
as soon as they have obtained sufficient vitality to 
make them worthy of notice, either as tributaries to 
be desired or potential competitors to be feared. 
Petty industries in a very large number of cases 
represent a stage in social descent, the wreckage of 
larger industries whose owners are economically as 
poor as the ordinary wage-workers, or even poorer 
and more to be pitied. Where, on the contrary, it is 
a stage in social ascent, the petty industry is, para- 
doxical as the idea may appear, part of the process of 
industrial concentration. By independent gleaning, 
it endeavors to find sufficient business to maintain its 
existence. If it fails in this, its owner falls down to 
the proletarian level from which, in most instances, 
he arose. If it succeeds only to a degree sufficient to 
maintain its owner at or near the average wage- 
earner's level of comfort, it may pass unnoticed and 
unmolested. If, on the other hand, it gleans sufficient 
business to make it desirable as a tributary, or poten- 
tially dangerous as a competitor, the petty business 
is pounced upon by its mightier rival and either ab- 
sorbed or crushed, according to the temper or need 
of the latter. Critics of the Marxian system have for 
the most part completely failed to recognize this sig- 
nificant aspect of the subject, and attached far too much 
importance to the continuance of petty industries. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 105 

IV 

What is true of petty industry is true in even 
greater measure of retail trade. Nothing could well 
be further from the truth than the hasty generaliza- 
tions of some critics, that an increase in the number 
of retail business establishments invalidates the 
Socialist theory of the concentration of capital. In 
the first place, many of these establishments have no 
independence whatsoever, but are merely agencies of 
larger enterprises. Mr. Macrosty 1 has shown that in 
London the cheap restaurants are in the hands of 
four or five firms, while much the same conditions 
exist in connection with the trade in milk and bread. 
Similar conditions prevail in almost all the large cities 
in this and most other countries. Single companies 
are known to control hundreds of saloons ; restaurants, 
cigar stores, shoe stores, bake shops, coal depots, and 
a multitude of other businesses, are subject to like 
conditions, and it is doubtful whether, after all, there 
has been the real increase of individual ownership 
which Mr. Ghent concedes. 2 However that may be, 
it is certain that a very large number of the business 
establishments which figure as statistical units in 
the argument against the Socialist theory of the 

1 The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry (Fabian Tract), by 
H. W. Macrosty. 

2 Our Benevolent Feudalism, by W. J. Ghent, pages 17-21. 



106 SOCIALISM 

concentration of capital should be regarded as so 
many evidences in its favor. 

A very large number, moreover, are really held 
by speculators, and serve only as a means of divest- 
ing prudent and thrifty artisans and others of their 
little savings. Whoever has lived in the poorer 
quarters of a great city, where small stores are most 
numerous, and has watched the changes constantly 
occurring in the stores of the neighborhood, will 
realize the significance of this observation. The 
present writer has known stores on the upper East 
Side of New York, where he for several years re- 
sided, change hands as many as six or seven times 
in a single year. What happened was generally 
this: A workingman having been thrown out of 
work, or forced to give up his work by reason of age, 
sickness, or accident, decided to attempt to make a 
living in " business." In a few weeks, or a few 
months at most, his small savings were swallowed 
up, and he had to leave the store, making way for 
the next victim. An acquaintance of the writer 
owns six tenement houses in different parts of New 
York City, the ground floors of which are occupied 
by small stores. These stores are rented out by the 
month just as other portions of the buildings are, 
and the owner, on going over his books for five years 
in response to an inquiry, found that the average 
duration of tenancy in them had been less than eight 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 107 

months. Still, small stores do exist; they have 
not been put out of existence by the big department 
stores as was confidently expected at one time. 
They serve a real social need by supplying the minor 
commodities of everyday use in small quantities. 
Many of them are conducted by married women to 
supplement the earnings of their husbands, or by 
widows; others by men unable to work whose in- 
come from them is less than the wages of artisans. 
These, probably, constitute a majority of the small 
retail establishments which show any tendency to 
increase. 

Thus reduced, the increase of small industries 
and retail establishments affects the contention 
that there is a general tendency to concentration 
exceedingly little. The effect is still further lessened 
when it is remembered that, except by ill-informed 
persons, the Marxian theory has never been under- 
stood to mean that all petty industry and business 
must disappear, that all the little industries and 
retail businesses must be concentrated into large 
ones, to make Socialism possible. Many of these 
would doubtless continue to exist under a Socialist 
regime. Kautsky, perhaps the ablest living expo- 
nent of the Marxian theories, admits this. He has 
very ably .argued that the ripeness of society for 
social production and control depends, not upon 
the number of little industries that still remain, 



108 SOCIALISM 

but upon the number of great industries which al- 
ready exist. 1 The ripeness of society for Socialism 
is not disproved by the number of ruins and relics 
abounding. " Without a developed great industry, 
Socialism is impossible/' says this writer. "Where, 
however, a great industry exists to a considerable 
degree, it is easy for a Socialist society to concentrate 
'production, and to quickly rid itself of the little indus- 
try." 2 It is the increase of large industries, then, 
which Socialists regard as the essential preUminary 
condition of Socialism. 

When we turn to agriculture, the criticisms of 
the Socialist theory of concentration appear more 
substantial and important. A few years ago we 
witnessed the rise and rapid growth of the great 
bonanza farms in this country. It was shown that 
the advantages of large capital and the consolida- 
tion of productive forces resulted, in farming as 
in manufacture, in greatly cheapened production. 3 
The end of the small farm was declared to be immi- 
nent, and it seemed for a while that concentration 
in agriculture would even outrun concentration in 
manufacture. This predicted absorption of the small 



1 The Social Revolution, by Karl Kautsky, Part I, page 144. 

2 Idem. 

3 The cost of raising wheat in California, where large farming has 
been most scientifically developed, is said to vary from 92.5 cents 
per 100 pounds on farms of 1000 acres to 40 cents on farms of 50,000 
acres. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 109 

farms by the larger, and the average increase of 
farm acreage, has not, however, been fulfilled to any 
great degree. An increase in the number of small 
farms, and a decrease in the average acreage, is 
shown in almost all the states. The increase of 
great estates shown by the census figures probably 
bears little or no relation to real farming, consisting 
mainly of great stock grazing ranches in the West, 
and unproductive gentlemen's estates in the East. 

Apparently then, the Socialist theory of "the 
big fish eat up the little ones," is not applicable to 
agriculture. On the contrary, it seems that the 
great wheat ranch cannot compete with the smaller 
farm. It is therefore not surprising that writers 
so sympathetic to Socialism as Professor Werner 
Sombart, and Professor Richard T. Ely, should pro- 
claim that the Marxian system breaks down when 
it reaches the sphere of agricultural industry, and 
that it appears to be applicable only to manufacture. 
That is the position which has been taken by a not 
inconsiderable body of Socialists in recent years. 
Nothing is more delusive than statistical argument 
of this kind, and while these conclusions should be 
given due weight, they should not be too hastily 
accepted. An examination of the statistical basis 
of the argument may not confirm the argument. 

In the first place, small agricultural holdings do 
not necessarily imply economic independence any 



110 SOCIALISM 

more than do petty industries or businesses. When 
we examine the census figures carefully, the first 
important fact which challenges attention is the 
decrease of independent farm ownership, and a cor- 
responding increase in tenantry. Of the 5,739,657 
farms in the United States in the census year, 2,026,286 
were operated by tenants. In 1880, 71.6 per cent 
of the farms in the United States were operated by 
their owners, while in 1900 the proportion had 
fallen to 64.7 per cent. Concerning the ownership 
of these rented farms little investigation has been 
made, and it is probable that careful inquiry into 
the subject would elicit the fact that this forms a 
not unimportant aspect of agricultural concentra- 
tion, though it is not revealed by the census figures. 
So, too, with the mortgaged farm holdings. In 
1890, the mortgaged indebtedness of the farmers 
of the United States amounted to the immense sum 
of $1,085,995,960. Concerning the ownership of 
these mortgages also little accurate data has been 
gathered. It is well known that the great insurance, 
banking, and trust companies have many millions 
invested in them. Mr. A. M. Simons, to whose not- 
able little book, The American Farmer, 1 1 am indebted 
for much material, rightly regards this as "a form 
of concentration beside which that of the bonanza 
farms sinks into insignificance." 

1 The American Farmer, by A. M. Simons, page 120. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 111 

The truth is that industrial concentration may 
take other forms than the diminution of small in- 
dustrial units, and their absorption or supercession 
by larger units. The sweated trades are a familiar 
example of this fact. Over and over it has been 
shown that while small establishments remain a 
necessary condition of sweated industry, there is 
generally a concentration of ownership and control. 
This is true in a large measure of the retail trades, 
and in even larger measure of agriculture. Mani- 
festly, therefore, we need a more accurate defini- 
tion of concentration than the one generally accepted. 
Mr. Simons, in the work already quoted, defines con- 
centration as "a movement tending to give a con- 
tinually diminishing minority of the persons engaged 
in any industry, a constantly increasing control 
over the essentials, and a continually increasing 
share of the total value of the returns of the indus- 
try." 1 It is no part of the purpose of this chapter 
to discuss the several conditions which Mr. Simons 
lays down in his definition of concentration, but to 
emphasize the fact that there are other forms of 
concentration than the physical one, the amalga- 
mation of smaller units to form larger ones; and 
that concentration goes on often unperceived and 
unsuspected. There can be no doubt that there 
is a considerable tendency to the concentration of 

1 The American Farmer, page 97. 



112 SOCIALISM 

ownership and effective control in agricultural 
industry. 

There is also a vast amount of concentration in 
agricultural production which is not generally recog- 
nized. Many branches of farming industry, as it 
was carried on by our fathers and their fathers be- 
fore them, have been transferred from the farm- 
house to the factory. Butter and cheese making, 
for example, have largely passed out of the farm 
kitchen into the factory. Not long ago, the writer 
stayed for some days at a large farm in the Middle 
West. The sound of a churn is never heard there, 
notwithstanding that it is a "dairy farm," and all 
the butter and cheese consumed in that household 
is bought at the village store. The invention of 
labor-saving machinery and its application to agri- 
culture leads to the division of the industry and the 
absorption of the parts most influenced by the new 
processes by the factory. When we remember the 
tremendous role which complex mechanical agen- 
cies play in modern agricultural industry, the grain 
elevators, cold-storage houses, and even railroads, 
being part of the necessary equipment of produc- 
tion, we see the subject of concentration in agri- 
culture in a new light. There is much concentration 
of production in agriculture though it may take the 
form of the absorption of some of its processes by 
factories instead of by other farms. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 113 



We must distinguish between the concentration 
of industry and the concentration of wealth. While 
there is a natural relation between these two phe- 
nomena, they are by no means identical. Trustifi- 
cation of a given industry may bring together a score 
of industrial units in one gigantic concern, so con- 
centrating capital and production; but it is conceiv- 
able that every one of the owners of the units which 
compose the trust may have a share in it equal to 
the capital value of his particular unit, and far more 
profitable. In that case, there can obviously be 
no concentration of wealth. It may even happen 
that a larger number of persons participate, as 
shareholders, in the amalgamation than previously. 
Concentration of wealth may be very intimately 
and inextricably associated with concentration of 
capital, but it is not by any means the same thing. 
As Professor Ely says: "If the stock of the United 
States Steel Corporation were owned by individuals 
holding one share each, the concentration in industry 
would be just as great as it is now, but there would 
be a wide diffusion in the ownership of the wealth 
of the corporation." 1 

Obvious as this distinction may seem, it is very 

1 Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, by Richard T. Ely, 
page 255. 



114 SOCIALISM 

often lost sight of ; and when recognized, it presents 
difficulties which seem almost insurmountable. It 
is well-nigh impossible to present statistically the 
relation of the concentration of capital to the con- 
centration or diffusion of wealth, important as the 
point is in its bearings upon modern Socialist theory. 
While the distinction does not affect the argument 
that the concentration of capital and industry 
makes their socialization possible, it is nevertheless 
an important fact. If, as some writers, notably 
Bernstein, 1 the Socialist, have argued, the concen- 
tration of capital and industry really leads to the 
decentralization of wealth, and the diffusion of the 
advantages of concentration among the great mass 
of the people, then, instead of creating a class of 
expropriators, ever becoming less numerous, and a 
class of proletarians, ever growing in numbers, the 
tendency of modern capitalism is to distribute the 
gains of industry over a widening area, a process 
of democratization, in fact. Obviously, if this con- 
tention is a correct one, there must be a softening 
rather than an intensifying of class antagonisms: 
a tendency away from class divisions, and to greater 
satisfaction with present conditions, rather than 
increasing discontent. If this theory can be sus- 
tained, the advocates of Socialism will be obliged 

1 Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus, by Edward Bernstein, 
page 47. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 115 

to change the nature of their propaganda, and cease 
appealing to the class interest of the proletariat 
because it has no existence in fact. There can be 
no validity in the theory of an increasing antagonism 
of classes, if the tendency of modern capitalism is 
to democratize the life of the world and diffuse its 
wealth over larger social areas than ever before. 

The exponents of this theory have for the most 
part based their arguments upon statistical data 
relating to: (1) The number of taxable incomes in 
countries where incomes are taxed; (2) the number 
of investors in industrial and commercial com- 
panies; (3) the number of savings bank deposits. 
As often happens when reliance is placed upon the 
direct statistical method, the result of all the dis- 
cussion and controversy upon this subject is ex- 
tremely disappointing and confusing. The same 
figures are used to support both sides in the dispute 
with equal plausibility. The difficulty lies in the 
fact that the available statistics do not include all 
the facts essential to a scientific and conclusive result. 

It is not my purpose in this little volume to add 
to the Babel of voices in this discussion, but to pre- 
sent the conclusions of two or three of the most 
careful investigators in this field. Professor Rich- 
ard T. Ely 1 quotes a table of incomes in the Grand 

1 Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, by Richard T. Ely, 
pages 261-262. 



116 SOCIALISM 

Duchy of Baden, based on the income tax returns 
of that country, which has formed the theme of 
much dispute. The table shows that in the two 
years, 1886 and 1896, less than one per cent of the 
incomes assessed were over 10,000 marks a year, 
and from that fact it has been argued that wealth 
in that country has not been concentrated to any 
very great extent. In like manner, the French 
economist, Leroy Beaulieu, has argued that the 
fact that in 1896 only 2750 persons in Paris had 
incomes of over 100,000 francs a year betokens a 
wide diffusion of wealth and an absence of concen- 
tration. 1 But the important point of the discus- 
sion, the proportion of total wealth owned by these 
classes, is entirely lost sight of by those who argue in 
this way. In the figures for the Grand Duchy of 
Baden we have no particulars concerning the num- 
ber and amount of incomes below 500 marks, but 
of the persons assessed upon incomes of 500 marks 
and over, in 1886, the poorest two thirds had about 
one third of the total assessed income, and the rich- 
est .69 of one per cent had 12.78 per cent of the total 
income. So far, the figures show a much greater 
concentration of wealth than appears from the simple 
fact that less than one per cent of the incomes as- 
sessed were over 10,000 marks a year. When we 

1 Essai sur la repartition des richesses et sur la tendance a une 
moindre ine'galite' des conditions, par Leroy Beaulieu, page 564. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 117 

compare the two years, we find that this concentra- 
tion increased during ten years as follows : In 1886, 
there were 2212 incomes of more than 10,000 marks 
assessed, being .69 of one per cent of the total num- 
ber. In 1896, there were 3099 incomes of more than 
10,000 marks assessed, being .78 of one per cent of 
the total number. In 1886, .69 of one per cent of 
the incomes assessed amounted to 51,403,000 marks, 
representing 12.77 per cent of the total incomes 
assessed, while in 1896, .78 of one per cent of the 
incomes assessed amounted to 81,986,000 marks, 
representing 15.02 per cent of the total incomes 
assessed. In 1886, there were 18 incomes of over 
200,000 marks a year, aggregating 6,864,000 marks, 
1.70 per cent of the total value of all incomes as- 
sessed; in 1896, there were 28 such incomes, aggre- 
gating 12,481,000 marks, or 2.29 per cent of the 
total value of all incomes assessed. The increase 
of concentration is not disputable. 

According to the late Professor Richmond Mayo- 
Smith, 1 70 per cent of the population of Prussia 
have incomes below the income tax standard, their 
total income representing only one third of the total 
income of the population. An additional one 
fourth of the population enjoys one third of the 
total income, while the remaining one third goes 

1 Statistics and Economics, by Richmond Mayo-Smith, Book III, 
Distribution. 



118 SOCIALISM 

to about 4 per cent of the people. The significance 
of these figures is clearly shown by the following 
diagram : — 

DIAGRAM 
Showing the Distribution of Income by Classes in Prussia. 

SHARE OF EACH 
CLASS IN THE 
POPULATION BY CLASSES NATIONAL INCOME 



In Saxony the statistics show that "two thirds 
of the population possess less than one third of the 
income; and that 3.5 per cent of the upper incomes 
receive more than 66 per cent at the lower end." 
From a table prepared by Sir Robert Giffen, a no- 
toriously optimistic statistician, always the expo- 
nent of an ultra-roseate view of social conditions, 
Professor Mayo-Smith l concludes that in England, 
"about 10 per cent of the people receive nearly one 
half of the total income." 

In this country the absence of income tax figures 
makes it impossible to get direct statistical evidence 
as to the distribution of incomes. The most care- 
ful estimate of the distribution of wealth in the United 

1 Statistics and Economics, by Richmond Mayo-Smith, Book III, 
Distribution. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 119 

States yet made is that made by the late Dr. Charles 
B. Spahr. 1 In quoting Dr. Spahr's figures, however, 
I do not wish to be understood as accepting them 
as authoritative and conclusive. They are quoted 
simply as the conclusions reached by the most pa- 
tient, conscientious, and scientific examination of 
the distribution of wealth in this country yet made. 
Dr. Spahr's conclusion is that less than one half 
of the famihes in the United States are property- 
less; but that, nevertheless, seven eighths of the 
famihes own only one eighth of the national wealth, 
while 1 per cent of the families own more than the 
remaining 99 per cent. Professor Ely accepts the 
logic of the statistical data gathered in Europe and 
the United States, and says "such statistics as we 
have ... all indicate a marked concentration of 
wealth, both in this country and Europe." 2 

The growth of immense private fortunes is an 
indisputable evidence of the concentration of wealth. 
In 1855, according to a list published in the New 
York Sun, 3 there were only twenty-eight millionaires 
in the whole country, and a pamphlet published in 
Philadelphia ten years before that, in 1845, gave only 
ten estates valued at a million dollars or more. The 
richest of these estates was that of Stephen Girard, 

1 The Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States, by Charles 
B. Spahr (1896). 

2 Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society, page 265. 

3 Quoted by Cleveland Moffett in Success, January, 1906. 



120 SOCIALISM 

whose fortune was said to be $7,000,000. To-day 
it is estimated that there are more than five thou- 
sand millionaires in the United States, New York 
City alone claiming upward of two thousand. Not 
only has the number of these immense fortunes 
grown, but the size of individual fortunes has enor- 
mously increased. Mr. John D. Rockefeller is cred- 
ited by some of the most conservative financial 
experts in the country with the possession of a for- 
tune amounting to a billion dollars, a sum too vast 
to be comprehended. Mr. Waldron estimates that 
one twentieth of the families in the United States 
are receiving " one-third of the nation's annual 
income, and are able to absorb nearly two thirds 
of the annual increase made in the wealth of the 
nation." 1 To the unbiased observer, nothing is 
more strikingly evident than the concentration of 
wealth in the United States during the past few years. 



VI 



Summing up, we may state the argument of this 
chapter very briefly as follows : The Socialist theory 
is that competition is self-destructive, and that the 
inevitable result of the competitive process is to 
produce monoply, either through the crushing of 
the weak by the strong, or the combination of units 

1 Currency and Wealth, by George S. Waldron, page 102. 



CAPITALISM AND LAW OF CONCENTRATION 121 

as a result of a conscious recognition of the wastes 
of competition and the advantages of cooperation. 
The law of capitalist development, therefore, is from 
competition and division to combination and con- 
centration. As this concentration proceeds, a large 
class of proletarians is formed on the one hand and 
a small class of capitalist lords on the other, an es- 
sential antagonism of interests existing between 
the two classes. While Socialism does not preclude 
the continued existence of small private industry 
or business, it does require and depend upon the 
development of a large body of concentrated industry ; 
monopolies which can be consciously transformed 
into social monopolies, whenever the people so 
decide. 

The interindustrial and international trustifica- 
tion of industry and commerce shows a remarkable 
fulfillment of the law of capitalist concentration 
which the Socialists were the first to formulate; 
the existence of petty industries and businesses, 
or their increase even, being a relatively insignifi- 
cant matter compared with the enormous increase 
in large industries and businesses. In agriculture, 
concentration, while it does not proceed so rapidly 
or directly as in manufacture and commerce, and 
while it takes directions unforeseen by the Social- 
ists, proceeds surely nevertheless. Along with 
this concentration of capital and industry proceeds 



122 SOCIALISM 

the concentration of wealth into proportionately 
fewer hands. While a certain diffusion of wealth 
takes place through the mechanism of industrial 
concentration which affords numerous small invest- 
ors an opportunity to own shares in great indus- 
trial and commercial corporations, it is not sufficient 
to balance the expropriation which goes on in the 
competitive struggle, and it is true that a larger 
proportion of the national wealth is owned by a minor- 
ity of the population than ever before, that minor- 
ity being proportionately less numerous than ever 
before. 

Whatever defects there may be in the Marxian 
theory, and whatever modifications of it may be 
rendered necessary by changed conditions, it is per- 
fectly certain that in its main and essential features 
it has successfully withstood all the criticisms which 
have been directed against it. Economic literature 
is full of prophecies, but in its whole range there is 
not an instance of prophecy more literally fulfilled 
than that which Marx made concerning the mode 
of capitalist development. And Karl Marx was 
not a prophet — he but read clearly the meaning of 
certain facts which others could not read ; the law of 
social dynamics. That is not prophecy, but science. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 
I 

There is probably no part of the theory of modern 
Socialism which has called forth so much criticism 
and opposition as the doctrine of the class struggle. 
Many who are otherwise sympathetic to Socialism 
denounce this doctrine as narrow, brutal, and pro- 
ductive of antisocialistic feelings of class hatred. 
Upon all hands the doctrine is denounced as an 
un-American appeal to passion, and a wild exag- 
geration of social conditions. The insistence of 
Socialists upon this aspect of their propaganda is 
probably responsible for keeping as many people out- 
side their ranks as are at the present time identified 
with their movement. In other words, if the Social- 
ists would repudiate the doctrine that Socialism is a 
class movement, and make their appeal to the intelli- 
gence and conscience of all, instead of to the inter- 
ests of a class, they could probably double their 
numerical strength at once. To many, therefore, it 

123 



124 SOCIALISM 

seems a fatuous and quixotic policy to preach such 
a doctrine, and it is very commonly ascribed to the 
peculiar intellectual and moral myopia of fanati- 
cism. 

Before accepting such a conclusion, the reader is 
in duty bound to consider the Socialist side of the 
argument. There is no greater fanaticism, after 
all, than that which condemns what it does not 
take the trouble to understand. The Socialists 
claim that the doctrine is misrepresented; that it 
does not produce class hatred; and that it is a pivo- 
tal and vital point of Socialist philosophy. The 
class struggle is a law, they say, of social develop- 
ment. We only recognize the law, and are no more 
responsible for its existence than Newton was re- 
sponsible for the law of gravitation. We know 
that there were class struggles thousands of years 
before there was a Socialist movement, and it is 
therefore absurd to charge us with the creation of 
class antagonisms and class hatred. We realize 
perfectly well that if we would ignore this law in 
our propaganda, and make our appeal to a univer- 
sal sense of abstract justice and truth, many who 
now hold aloof from us would join our movement. 
But we should not gain strength as a result of their 
accession to our ranks. We should be obliged to 
emasculate Socialism, to dilute it, in order to win a 
support of questionable value. And history teems 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 125 

with examples of the disaster which inevitably at- 
tends such a course. We should be quixotic and 
fatuous indeed if we attempted anything of the 
kind. 

The class struggle theory is part of the economic 
interpretation of history. Since the dissolution of 
primitive tribal society, the modes of economic 
production and exchange have inevitably grouped 
men into economic classes. The theory is thus 
stated by Engels in the Introduction to the Com- 
munist Manifesto: — 

"In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode 
of economic production and exchange, and the social 
organization necessarily following from it, form the 
basis upon which is built up, and from which alone 
can be explained, the political and intellectual his- 
tory of that epoch; and, consequently, the whole 
history of mankind (since the dissolution of primi- 
tive society, holding land in common ownership) 
has been a history of class struggles, contests be- 
tween exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed 
classes ; that the history of these class struggles forms 
a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage 
has been reached, where the exploited and oppressed 
class — the proletariat — cannot attain its eman- 
cipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling 
class — the bourgeoisie — without, at the same 
time, and once for all, emancipating society at large 



126 SOCIALISM 

from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, 
and class struggles." l 

In this classic statement of the theory, there are 
several fundamental propositions. First, that class 
divisions and class struggles arise out of the eco- 
nomic foundations of society. Second, that since the 
dissolution of primitive tribal society, which was 
communistic in character, mankind has been divided 
into economic groups or classes, and all its history 
has been a history of struggles between these classes, 
ruling and ruled, exploiting and exploited, being 
forever at war with each other. Third, that the 
different epochs in human history, stages in the 
evolution of society, have been characterized by 
the interests of the ruling class. Fourth, that a 
stage has now been reached in the evolution of so- 
ciety, where the struggle assumes a form which 
makes it impossible for class distinctions and class 
struggles to continue if the exploited and oppressed 
class, the proletariat, succeeds in emancipating it- 
self. In other words, the cycle of class struggles 
which began with the dissolution of rude, tribal 
communism, and the rise of private property, ends 
with the passing of private property in the means 
of social existence and the rise of Socialism. The 
proletariat in emancipating itself destroys all the 
conditions of class rule. 

1 The Communist Manifesto, Kerr edition, page 8. 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 127 

II 

As we have already seen, slavery is historically 
the first system of class division which presents it- 
self. Some ingenious writers have endeavored to 
trace the origin of slavery to the institution of the 
family, the children being the slaves. It is fairly 
certain, however, that slavery originated in con- 
quest. When a tribe was conquered and enslaved 
by some more powerful tribe, all the members of 
the vanquished tribe sunk to one common level of 
degradation and servility. Their exploitation as 
laborers was the principal object of their enslave- 
ment, and their labor admitted of little gradation. 
It is easy to see the fundamental class antagonisms 
which characterized slavery. Had there been no 
uprisings of the slaves, no active and conscious 
struggle against their masters, the antagonism of 
interests between them and their masters would be 
none the less apparent. But the overthrow of 
slavery was not the result of the rebellions and 
struggles of the slaves. While these undoubtedly 
helped, the principal factors in the overthrow of 
chattel slavery as the economic foundation of society 
were the disintegration of the system to the point 
of bankruptcy, and the rise of a new, and sometimes, 
as in the case of Rome, alien ruling class. 

The class divisions of feudal society are not less 



128 SOCIALISM 

obvious than those of chattel slavery. The main 
division, the widest gulf, divided the feudal 
lord and the serf. Often as brutally ill-treated as 
their slave-chattel forefathers had been, the feudal 
serfs from time to time made abortive struggles. 
The class distinctions of feudalism were constant, 
but the struggles between the lords and the 
serfs were sporadic, and of little moment, just 
as the risings of their slave forefathers had been. 
But alongside of the feudal estate there existed 
another class, the free handicraftsmen and peasants, 
the former organized into powerful guilds. It was 
this class which was to challenge the rule of the 
feudal nobility, and wage war upon it. As the feudal 
ruling class was a landed class, so the class represented 
by the guilds became a moneyed and commercial 
class, the pioneers of our modern capitalist class. 
As Mr. Brooks Adams * has shown very clearly, it 
was this moneyed, commercial class, which gave 
to the king the instrument for weakening and 
finally overthrowing feudalism. It was this class 
which built up the cities and towns from which was 
drawn the revenue for the maintenance of a stand- 
ing army. The capitalist class triumphed over the 
feudal nobility and its interests became the domi- 
nant interests in society. Capitalism effectually de- 

1 In Centralization and the Law : Scientific Legal Education. An 
Illustration. Edited by Melville M. Bigelow. 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 129 

stroyed all the institutions of feudalism which ob- 
structed its progress, leaving only those which were 
innocuous and to be safely ignored. 

In capitalist society, the main class division is 
that which separates the employing, wage-paying 
class from the employed, wage-receiving class. 
Notwithstanding all the elaborate arguments made 
to prove the contrary, the frequently heard myth 
that the interests of Capital and Labor are identical, 
and the existence of pacificatory associations based 
upon that myth, there is no fact in the whole range 
of social phenomena more self-evident than the 
existence of an inherent, fundamental antagonism 
in the relationship of employer and employee. As 
individuals, in all other relations, they may have 
a commonality of interests, but as employer and 
employee they are fundamentally and necessarily 
opposed. They may belong to the same church, 
and so have religious interests in common ; they 
may have common racial interests, as, for instance, 
if negroes, in protecting themselves against the 
attacks of the author of The Clansman, or, if Jews, 
in opposing anti-Semitic movements; as citizens 
they may have the same civic interests, be equally 
opposed to graft in the city government, or equally 
interested in the adoption of wise sanitary precau- 
tions against epidemics. They may even have a 
common industrial interest in the general sense that 



130 SOCIALISM 

they may be equally interested in the development 
of the industry in which they are engaged, and fear, 
equally, the results of a depression in trade. But 
in their special relations as employer and employee 
they have antithetical interests. 

The interest of the wage-worker, as wage-worker, 
is to receive the largest wage possible for the least 
number of hours spent in labor. The interest of 
the employer, as employer, on the other hand, is 
to secure from the worker as many hours of service, 
as much labor power, as possible for the lowest 
wage which the worker can be induced to accept. 
The workers employed in a factory may be divided 
by a hundred different forces. They may be divided 
by racial differences, for instance; but while pre- 
serving those differences in a large measure, they 
will tend to unite upon the question of their imme- 
diate economic interest. Some of our great labor 
unions, notably the United Mine Workers, 1 afford 
remarkable illustrations of this fact. If the divi- 
sion is caused by religious differences, the same 
unanimity of economic interests will sooner or later 
be developed. With the employers it is the same. 
They, too, may be divided by a hundred forces; 
the competition among them may be keen and fierce, 
but common economic interest will tend to unite 

1 See, for instance, The Coal Mine Workers, by Frank Julian 
Warne, Ph.D. (1905). 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 131 

them. Racial, religious, social, and other divisions 
may be maintained as before, but they will, in gen- 
eral, unite for the protection and furtherance of their 
common economic interests. 

That individual workers and employers will be 
found who do not recognize their class interests is 
true, but that fact by no means invalidates the con- 
tention that, in general, men will recognize and unite 
upon a basis of common class interests. In both 
classes are to be found individuals who attach greater 
importance to the preservation of racial, religious, 
or social, rather than economic, interests. But 
because the economic interest is fundamental, in- 
volving the very basis of life, the question of food, 
clothing, shelter, and comfort, these individuals 
are and must be exceptions to the general rule. 
Workers sink their racial and religious differences 
and unite to secure better wages, a reduction of the 
hours of labor, and better conditions in general. 
Employers, similarly, unite to oppose whatever 
may threaten their class interests, without regard 
to other relationships. The Gentile employer who 
is himself an anti-Semite has no qualms of conscience 
about employing Jewish workmen, at low wages, 
to compete with Gentile workers; he does not ob- 
ject to joining with Jewish employers in an Employ- 
ers' Association, if thereby his economic interests 
may be safeguarded. And the Jewish employer, 



132 SOCIALISM 

likewise, has no objection to joining with the Gentile 
employer for mutual protection, or to the employ- 
ment of Gentile workers to fill the places of his em- 
ployees, members of his own race, who have gone 
out on strike for higher wages. 

Ill 

The class struggle, therefore, presents itself in 
the present stage of social development as a conflict 
between the wage-paying and the wage-paid classes. 
That is the dominating and all-absorbing conflict 
of the age in which we live. True, there are other 
class interests more or less involved. There are the 
indefinite, inchoate, vague, and uncertain interests 
of that large, so-called middle class, composed of 
farmers, retailers, professional men, and so on. The 
interests of this large class are not, and cannot be, 
as definitely defined. They vacillate, conforming 
now to the interests of the wage-workers, now to 
the interests of the employers. The farmer, for 
instance, may oppose an increase in the wages of 
farm laborers, because that touches him directly 
as an employer. His attitude is that of the capi- 
talist class as a whole upon that question. At the 
same time, he may be heartily in favor of an in- 
crease of wages to miners, carpenters, bricklayers, 
shoemakers, printers, painters, factory workers, and 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 133 

non-agrieultural workers in general, for the reason 
that while a general rise of wages, resulting in a 
general rise in prices, will affect him slightly as a 
consumer, it will benefit him much more as a seller 
of the products of his farm. In short, consciously 
sometimes, but unconsciously oftener still, personal 
or class interests control our thoughts, opinions, 
beliefs, and actions. 

This does not mean that men are never actuated 
by other than selfish motives ; that a sordid mate- 
rialism is the only motive force at work in the world. 
In general, class interests and personal interests 
coincide, but there are certainly occasions when they 
conflict. Many an employer, having no quarrel 
with his employees, and confident that he personally 
will be the loser thereby, joins in a fight upon labor 
unions because he is conscious that the interests of 
his class are involved. In a similar way, working- 
men enter upon sympathetic strikes, consciously, 
at an immediate loss to themselves, because they 
place class loyalty before personal gain. It is sig- 
nificant of class feeling and temper that when em- 
ployers act in this manner, and lock out employees 
with whom they have no trouble, simply to help 
other employers to win their battles, they are be- 
lauded by the very newspapers which denounce the 
workers whenever they adopt a like policy. It is 
also true that there are individuals in both classes 



134 SOCIALISM 

who never become conscious of their class interests, 
and steadfastly refuse to join with their fellows. 
The workingman who refuses to join a union, or 
who " scabs" when his fellow-workers go out on 
strike, may act from ignorance or from sheer self- 
ishness and greed. His action may be due to his 
placing personal interest before the larger interest 
of his class, or from being too short-sighted to see 
that ultimately his own interests must merge in 
those of his class. Many an employer, on the other 
hand, may refuse to join in any concerted action of 
his class for either of these reasons, or he may even 
rise superior to his personal and class interests and 
support the workers because he believes in the just- 
ness of their cause, realizing perfectly well that 
their gain means loss to him or to his class. 1 

The influence of class environment upon men's 
beliefs and ideals is a subject which our most volu- 
minous ethicists have scarcely touched upon as yet. 
It is a commonplace saying that each age has its 
own standards of right and wrong, but little effort 
has been made, if we except the Socialists, 2 to trace 
this fact to its source, to the economic conditions 



1 This ought to be a sufficient answer to those shallow critics who 
think that they dispose of the class struggle theory of modern 
Socialism by enumerating those of its leading exponents who do not 
belong to the proletariat. 

2 Mr. Ghent's excellent work, Mass and Class, is perhaps the best 
work extant on the subject from the Socialist viewpoint. 



THE CLASS STEUGGLE THEORY 135 

prevailing in the different ages. Still less effort 
has been made to account for the different standards 
held by the different social classes at the same time, 
and by which each class judges the other. In our 
own day the idea of slavery is generally held in 
abhorrence. There was a time, however, when it 
was universally looked upon as a divine institution, 
alike by slaveholder and slave. It is simply impos- 
sible to account for this complete revolution of feel- 
ing upon any other hypothesis than that slave 
labor then seemed absolutely essential to the life 
of the world. The slave lords of antiquity, the 
feudal lords of mediaeval times, and, more recently, 
the Southern slaveholders in our own country, all 
believed that slavery was eternally right. When 
the slaves took an opposite view and rebelled, they 
were believed to be in rebellion against God and 
nature. The Church represented the same view 
just as vigorously as it now opposes it. The slave 
owners who held slavery to be a divine institution, 
and the priests and ministers who supported them, 
were just as honest and sincere in their belief as we 
are in holding antagonistic beliefs to-day. 

What was accounted a virtue in the slave, was 
accounted a vice in the slaveholder. Cowardice 
and a cringing humility were not regarded as faults 
in a slave. On the contrary, they were the stock 
virtues of the pattern slave, and added to the esti- 



136 SOCIALISM 

mation in which he was held, just as similar traits 
are valued in personal servants — butlers, valets, 
footmen, and similar flunkeys — in our own day. 
But similar traits in the feudal baron, the Southern 
slaveholder, or the " gentleman" of to-day, would 
be regarded as terrible faults. As Mr. -Algernon 
Lee very tersely puts it, "The slave was not a slave 
because of his slavish ideals and beliefs; the slave 
was slavish in his ideals and beliefs because he lived 
the life of a slave." * 



IV 



To-day we find a similar divergence of ethical 
standards. What the laborers regard as wrong, 
the employers regard as absolutely and immutably 
right. The actions of the workers in forming unions 
and compelling unwilling members of their own 
class to join them, even resorting to the bitter expe- 
dient of striking against them with a view to starv- 
ing them into submission, seem terribly oppressive 
and unjust to the employers and the class to which 
the employers belong. To the workers themselves, 
on the other hand, such actions have all the sanc- 
tions of conscience. Similarly, many actions of 
the employers, in which they themselves see no 

1 The Worker, March 25, 1905. 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 137 

wrong, seem almost incomprehensibly wicked to 
the workers. 

Leaving aside the wholesale fraud of our ordi- 
nary commercial advertisements, the shameful adul- 
teration of goods, and a multitude of other such 
nefarious practices, it is at once interesting and in- 
structive to compare the employers' denunciations 
of the " outrageous infringement of personal liberty," 
when the " oppressor" is a labor union, with some 
of their everyday practices. The same employers 
who loudly, and quite sincerely, condemn the mem- 
bers of a union who endeavor to bring about the 
discharge of a fellow-worker because he declines to 
join their organization, have no scruples of conscience 
about discharging a worker simply because he be- 
longs to a union, and effectually " blacklisting " him 
so that it becomes almost or quite impossible for 
him to obtain employment at his trade elsewhere. 
While loudly declaiming against the "conspiracy" 
of the workers to raise wages, they see no wrong in 
an " agreement" of manufacturers or mine owners 
to reduce wages. If the members of a labor union 
should break the law, especially if they should com- 
mit an act of violence during a strike, the organs 
of capitalist opinion teem with denunciation, but 
there is no breath of condemnation for the outrages 
committed by employers or their agents against 
union men. 



138 SOCIALISM 

During the great anthracite coal strike of 1903, 
and again during the disturbances in Colorado in 
1904, it was evident to every fair-minded observer 
that the mine owners were at least quite as lawless 
and violent as the strikers. But there was hardly 
a scintilla of adverse comment upon the mine owners' 
lawlessness in the organs of capitalist opinion, while 
they poured forth torrents of righteous indignation 
at the lawlessness of the miners. When labor 
leaders, like the late Sam Parks, for example, are 
accused of extortion and receiving bribes, the em- 
ployers and their retainers, through pulpit, press, 
and every other avenue of public opinion, denounce 
the culprit, the bribe taker, in unmeasured terms — 
but the bribe giver is excused, or, at worst, lightly 
criticised. These are but a few common illustra- 
tions of class conscience. Any careful observer will 
be able to add almost indefinitely to the number. 

It would be perfectly easy to compile a large cata- 
logue of such examples as these from the actual 
happenings of the past few years — sufficient to 
convince the most skeptical that class interests do 
produce a class conscience. Mr. Ghent aptly ex- 
presses a profound truth when he says: " There is a 
spiritual alchemy which transmutes the base metal 
of self-interest into the gold of conscience ; the trans- 
mutation is real, and the resulting frame of mind 
is not hypocrisy, but conscience. It is a class con- 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 139 

science, and therefore partial and imperfect, having 
little to do with absolute ethics. But partial and 
imperfect as it is, it is generally sincere." ' No 
better test of the truth of this can be made than by 
reading carefully for a few weeks the comments of 
half a dozen representative newspapers, and of an 
equal number of representative labor papers, upon 
current events. The antithetical nature of their 
judgments of men and events demonstrates the 
existence of a distinct class conscience. It cannot 
be interpreted in any other way. 



A great many people, while admitting the impor- 
tant role class struggles have played in the progres- 
sive development of the race, strenuously deny the 
existence of classes in the United States. They 
freely admit the class divisions and struggles of the 
Old World, but they deny that a similar class antag- 
onism exists in this country; they fondly believe 
the United States to be a glorious exception to the 
rule, and regard the claim that classes exist here as 
falsehood and treason. The Socialists are forever 
being accused of seeking to apply to American life 
judgments based upon European facts and condi- 
tions. It is easy to visualize the class divisions 

1 Mass and Class, page 101. 



140 SOCIALISM 

existing in monarchical countries, where there are 
hereditary ruling classes — even though these are 
only nominal ruling classes in most cases — fixed 
by law. But it is not so easy to recognize the fact 
that, even in these countries, the power is held by 
the financial and industrial lords, and not by the 
kings and their titular nobility. The absence of 
a hereditary, titular ruling class serves to hide the 
real class divisions existing in this country from many 
people. 

Nevertheless, there is a perceptible growth of 
uneasiness and unrest; a widening and deepening 
conviction that while we may retain the outward 
forms of democracy, and shout its shibboleths with 
patriotic fervor, its essentials are lacking. The 
feeling spreads, even in the most conservative circles, 
that we are developing, or have already developed, 
a distinct ruling class. The anomaly of a ruling 
class without legal sanction or titular prestige has 
seized upon the popular mind; titles have been 
created for our great "untitled nobility" — mock 
titles, which have speedily assumed a serious im- 
port and meaning. Our financial " Kings," indus- 
trial " Lords," " Barons," and so on, have received 
their crowns and patents of nobility from the popu- 
lace. President Roosevelt gives expression to the 
feelings of a great mass of our most conservative 
citizenry when he says: "In the past, the most dire- 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 141 

ful among the influences which have brought about 
the downfall of republics has ever been the growth 
of the class spirit. ... If such a spirit grows up 
in this republic, it will ultimately prove fatal to us, 
as in the past it has proven fatal to every community 
in which it has become dominant." 1 

With the exception of the chattel slaves, we have 
had no hereditary class in this country with a legally 
fixed status. But 

"Man is more than constitutions," 

and there are other laws than those formulated in 
senates and recorded in statute books. The vast 
concentration of industry and wealth, resulting in 
immense fortunes on the one hand, and terrible 
poverty on the other, has separated the two classes 
by a chasm as deep and wide as ever yawned between 
czar and moujik, kaiser and vagrant, prince and 
pauper, feudal baron and serf. The immensity of 
the power and wealth thus concentrated into the 
hands of the few, to be inherited by their sons and 
daughters, tends to establish this class division heredi- 
tarily. Heretofore, passage from the lower class to 
the class above has been easy, and it has blinded 
people to the existing class antagonisms, though, as 
Mr. Ghent justly observes, it should no more be 
taken to disprove the existence of classes than the 

1 Message to Congress, January, 1906. 



142 SOCIALISM 

fact that so many thousands of Germans come to 
this country to settle is taken to disprove the exis- 
tence of the German Empire. 1 

But passage from the lower class to the upper 
tends to become, if not absolutely impossible and 
unthinkable, as difficult and rare as the transition 
from pauperism to princedom in the Old World is. 
A romantic European princess may marry a penu- 
rious coachman, and so provide the world with a 
nine days' sensation, but such instances are no rarer 
in the royal circles of Europe than in our own pluto- 
aristocratic court circles. Has there ever been a 
king in modern times with anything like the power 
of Mr. Rockefeller? Is any feature of royal recog- 
nition withheld from Mr. Morgan when he goes abroad 
in state, an uncrowned king, fraternizing with crowned 
but envious fellow-kings? The existence of classes 
in America to-day is as evident as the existence of 
America itself. 

VI 

Antagonisms of class interests have always ex- 
isted, even though not clearly recognized. It is 
only the consciousness of their existence, and the 
struggle produced by that consciousness, that are 
new. As we suddenly become aware of the pain and 

1 Mass and Class, page 53. 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 143 

ravages of disease, when we have not felt or heeded 
its premonitory symptoms, so, having neglected 
the fundamental class divisions of society, the bit- 
terness of the strife resulting therefrom shocks and 
alarms us. So long as it is possible for the stronger 
and more ambitious members of an inferior class to 
rise out of that class and join the ranks of the supe- 
rior class, so long will the struggle which ensues as 
the natural outgrowth of opposing interests be post- 
poned. 

Until quite recently, in the United States, this 
has been possible. Transition from the status of 
worker to that of capitalist has been easy. But 
with the era of concentration and the immense capi- 
tals required for industrial enterprise these transi- 
tions become fewer and more difficult, and class lines 
thus tend to become permanently fixed. The stronger 
and more ambitious members of the lower class, 
finding it impossible to rise into the class above, 
thus become impressed with a consciousness of their 
class status. The average worker no longer dreams 
of himself becoming an employer after a few years 
of industry and thrift. The ambitious and aggres- 
sive few no longer look with the contempt of the 
strong for the weak upon their less aggressive fellow- 
workers, but become leaders, preachers of a sig- 
nificant and admittedly dangerous gospel of class 
consciousness. 



144 SOCIALISM 

When the preachers are wise and sufficiently edu- 
cated to see their position in its historical perspec- 
tive, there is no class hatred engendered in the sense 
of a personal hatred for the capitalist on the part of 
the worker. But when that wisdom and education 
are lacking, personal hate and bitterness naturally 
result. The Socialists, accused as they are of seek- 
ing to stir up hatred and strife, by placing the class 
struggle in its proper place as one of the great social 
dynamic forces, have done and are doing more to 
allay hatred and bitterness of feeling, to save the 
world from the red curse of anarchistic vengeance, 
than any other body of people in the world. The 
Socialist movement is vastly more powerful as a 
force against the peril of Anarchism than all the 
religious agencies of the world combined. Wherever, 
as in Germany, for example, the Socialist movement 
is strong, Anarchism is impotent and weak. The 
reason for this is the very obvious one here given. 



VII 

Nowhere in the world, at any time in its history, 
has the alignment of classes been more evident than 
it is in the United States at the present time. With 
an average of over a thousand strikes a year, 1 some 

1 Vide War of the Classes, by Jack London, page 17. 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 145 

of them involving, directly, tens of thousands of 
producers, a few capitalists, and millions of non- 
combatants, consumers; with strikes, boycotts, 
lockouts, injunctions, and all the other incidents of 
organized class strife reported daily by the news- 
papers, denials of the existence of classes, or of the 
struggle between them, are manifestly absurd. We 
have, on the one hand, organizations of workers, 
labor unions, with a membership of something over 
2,000,000 in the United States; one organization 
alone, the American Federation of Labor, having 
an affiliated membership of 1,700,000. On the 
other hand, we have organizations of employers, 
formed for the expressed purpose of fighting the 
labor unions, of which the National Association of 
Manufacturers is the most perfect type yet evolved. 
While the leaders on both sides frequently deny 
that their organizations betoken the existence of a 
far-reaching fundamental class conflict, and, through 
ostensibly pacificatory organizations like the Na- 
tional Civic Federation, proclaim the " essential iden- 
tity of interests between capital and labor "; while 
an intelligent and earnest labor leader like Mr. John 
Mitchell joins with an astute capitalist leader like 
the late Senator Marcus A. Hanna in declaring 
that "there is no necessary hostility between labor 
and capital," that there is no " necessary, fundamen- 
tal antagonism between the laborer and the capi- 



146 SOCIALISM 

talist," * a brief study of the constitutions of these 
class organizations and their published reports, in 
conjunction with the history of the labor struggle in 
the United States, in which the names of Coeur de 
Alene, Homestead, Hazelton, and Cripple Creek 
appear in bloody letters, will show these denials 
to be the offspring of hypocrisy or delusion. If this 
much-talked-of unity of interests is anything but a 
stupid fiction, the great and ever increasing strife 
is only a question of mutual misunderstanding. 
All that is necessary to secure permanent peace is 
to remove that misunderstanding. If we believe 
this, it is a sad commentary upon human limita- 
tions, upon man's failure to understand his own 
life, that not a single person on either side has arisen 
with sufficient intelligence and breadth of view to 
state the relations of the two classes with clarity 
and force enough to accomplish that end. 

Let us get down to fundamentals, to bottom prin- 
ciples. 2 Why do men organize? Why was the 
first union started? Why do men pay out of their 
hard-earned wages to support unions now? The 
first union was not started because the men who 
started it did not understand their employers, or 
because they were misunderstood by their employers. 



1 Organized Labor, by John Mitchell, page ix. 

2 The remainder of this chapter is largely reproduced from my 
little pamphlet, Shall the Unions go into Politics? 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 147 

The explanation involves a deeper insight into things 
than that. The facts were somewhat as follows: 
When the individual workingman, feeling that out 
of his labor, and the labor of his fellows, came the 
wealth and luxury of his employer, demanded higher 
wages, a reduction of his hours of labor, or better 
conditions in general, he was met with a reply from 
his employer — who understood the workingman's 
position very well, much better, in fact, than the 
workingman himself did — something like this, 
"If you don't like this job, and my terms, you can 
quit ; there are plenty of others outside ready to take 
your place." The workingman and the employer, 
then, understood each other perfectly. The em- 
ployer understood the position of the worker, that 
he was dependent upon him, the employer, for oppor- 
tunity to earn his bread. The worker understood that 
so long as the employer could discharge him and fill 
his place with another, he was powerless. The com- 
bat between the workers and the masters of their 
bread has from the first been an unequal one. 

Nothing remained for the individual workingman 
but to join his fellows in a collective and united effort. 
So organizations of workers appeared, and the 
employers could not treat the matter as lightly as 
before when the workers demanded higher wages 
or other improvements in their conditions. The 
workers, when they organized, could take advantage 



148 SOCIALISM 

of the fact that there were no organizations of the 
employers. Every strike added to the ordinary 
terrors of the competitive struggle for the employers. 
The manufacturer whose men threatened to strike 
often surrendered because he feared most of all that 
his trade, in the event of a suspension of work, would 
be snatched by his rival in business, and so, by playing 
upon the inherent weakness of the competitive sys- 
tem as it affected the employers, the workers gained 
many substantial advantages. There is no doubt 
whatsoever that under these conditions the wage- 
workers got better wages, better working conditions, 
and a reduction of the hours of labor. It was, in many 
ways, the golden age of organized labor. But there 
was an important limitation of the workers' power — 
the unions could not absorb the man outside; they 
could not provide all the workers with employment. 
That is the essential condition of capitalist industry, 
there is always the " reserve army of the unemployed,' ' 
to use the expressive phrase of Friedrich Engels. 
Rare indeed are the times when all the available 
workers in any given industry are employed, and 
the time has probably never yet been when all the 
available workers in all industries were employed. 

Notwithstanding this important limitation of power, 
it is incontrovertible that the workers were benefited 
by their organization to no small extent. But only 
for a time. There came a time when the employers 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 149 

began to organize unions also. That they called 
their organizations by other and high-sounding names 
does not alter the fact that they were in reality unions 
formed to combat the unions which the workers had 
formed. Every employers' association is, in reality, 
a union of the men who employ labor against the 
unions of the men they employ. When the organized 
workers went to individual, unorganized employers, 
who feared their rivals more than they feared the 
workers, or, rather, who feared the workers most 
of all because rivals waited to snatch their trade, be- 
cause a strike made their employees allies with their 
competitors, the employers were afraid, naturally, 
to resist. The workers could play one employer 
against the other with constant success. But when 
the employers also organized, it was different. Then 
the individual employer, freed from the worst of his 
terrors, could say, "Do your worst. I, too, am in 
an organization." Then it became a battle betwixt 
organized capital and organized labor. When the 
workers went on strike in one shop or factory, de- 
pending for support upon their brother unionists 
employed in other shops or factories, the employers 
of these latter locked them out, thus cutting off 
the financial supplies of the strikers. In other cases, 
when the workers in one place went out on strike, 
the employer got his work done through other 
employers by the very fellow-members upon whom 



150 SOCIALISM 

the strikers were depending for support. Thus the 
workers were compelled to face this dilemma, either 
to withdraw these men, thus cutting off their means 
of support, or to be beaten by their fellow-members. 

Under these changed conditions, the workers were 
beaten time after time. It was a case of the worker's 
.cupboard against the master's warehouse, purse 
against bank account, poverty against wealth. How 
slight the workers' chances are in such a combat! 
A strike means that the workers on one side, and 
the employers on the other, seek to tire each other 
out by waiting. More truthfully, perhaps, it might be 
said that they seek to force each other by wait- 
ing patiently to see who first feels the pinch of 
hardship and poverty. Employers and employees 
determine to play the waiting game. Each waits 
patiently in the hope that the other will weaken. At 
last one — most often the workers' — side weakens 
and gives up the struggle. When the workers are 
thus beaten in a strike, they are not convinced that 
their demands are unreasonable or unjust; they are 
simply beaten at the waiting game because their 
resources are too small to enable them to withstand 
the struggle. 

When the master class, the masters of jobs and 
bread, organized their forces, they set narrow and 
sharp boundaries to the power of labor organizations. 
Henceforth the chances of victory were overwhelm- 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 151 

ingly on the side of the employers. The workers 
have since learned by bitter and costly experience 
that they are unable to play the individual employer's 
interests against other employers' interests. And 
the employers own the means of life. Meantime, 
too, they have learned that they are not only ex- 
ploited as producers, but also as buyers, as consumers. 
Because they are consumers, almost to the last penny 
of their incomes, having to spend almost every penny 
earned, that form of exploitation becomes a serious 
matter. But against this exploitation the unions 
have ever been absolutely powerless. Working- 
men have never made any very serious attempt to 
protect the purchasing capacity of their wages, 
notwithstanding its tremendous importance. The 
result has been that not a few of the "victories" so 
dearly won by trade union action have turned out 
to be hollow mockeries. When they have succeeded 
in getting a little better wages, prices have often 
gone up, most often in point of fact, so that the net 
result has been little to their advantage. In many 
cases, where the advance in wages applied only to 
a restricted number of trades, the advance in prices 
becoming general, the total result has been against 
the working class as a whole, and little or nothing to 
the advantage of the few who received the advance 
in immediate wages. At this point, the need of a 
social revolution is felt, which shall give to the workers 



152 SOCIALISM 

the control of the implements of labor, and also the 
full control of the product of their labor. In other 
words, the demand arises for independent, working- 
class action, aiming at the socialization of the means 
of production and the things produced. 

VIII 

A line of cleavage thus presents itself between 
those, on the one hand, who would continue the old 
methods of economic warfare, together with the ad- 
vocates of a revolution of physical force, and, on 
the other hand, the advocates of united political 
action on the part of the working class, consciously 
directed toward the socialization of industry and its 
products. The 400,000 odd Socialist votes in the 
United States, in 1904, represented the measure of 
the crystallization of this latter force, and whoever 
has studied the labor movement during the past few 
years must have realized that there is a tremendous 
drift of sentiment in that direction in the labor unions 
of the country. The clamor for political action in 
the labor unions presages an enormous advance 
of the political Socialist movement during the next 
few years 

The struggle between capital and labor thus 
promises to resolve itself into a political issue, the 
greatest political issue of history. This will not be 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 153 

due so much to the propaganda of the Socialists, it 
is safe to say, as to the action of the employers them- 
selves. They have taken the struggle into the politi- 
cal arena to suit their own immediate advantages, 
and when the workers realize the issue and accept 
it, the capitalists will not be able to thwart them. 
One is reminded of the saying of Marx that capital- 
ism produces its own gravediggers. In taking the 
industrial issue into the political arena, the capital- 
ists were destined to reveal to the workers, sooner 
or later, their power and duty. 

Realizing that all the forces of government are 
on their side, the legislative, judicial, and executive 
powers being controlled by their own class, the em- 
ployers have made the fight against labor political 
as well as economic in its character. When the 
workers have gone on strike and the employers have 
not cared to play the " waiting game/' choosing 
rather to avail themselves of the great reserve army of 
the unemployed workers outside, the natural resent- 
ment of the strikers, finding themselves in danger of 
being beaten by members of their own class, has led 
to violence which has been remorselessly suppressed by 
all the police and military forces at the command of 
the government. In many instances, the employers 
have themselves purposely provoked striking work- 
men to violence, and then called upon the govern- 
ment to crush the revolt thus made. Workers 



154 SOCIALISM 

have thus been shot down at the shambles in almost 
every state of the Union, no matter which politi- 
cal party has been in power. Nor have these forces 
of our class government been used merely to punish 
lawless union men and women on strike, to " uphold 
the sacred majesty of the law/' as the hypocritical 
phrase goes. As a matter of fact, they have been 
used to deny strikers the rights which belonged to 
them, and to protect capitalists and their agents in 
breaking the laws. No one can read with anything 
like an impartial spirit the records of the miners' 
strike in the Cceur de Alene mine, Idaho, or the 
Senate Report on the Labor Disturbances in Colorado 
from 1880 to 1904, and dispute this assertion. 

More important still, the workers have had to face 
the powerful opposition of the makers and inter- 
preters of the law. A body of class legislation, in 
the interests of the employing class, has been created, 
while the workers have begged in vain for protective 
legislation. There is no country in the world in 
which the interests of the workers have been so 
neglected as in the United States. There is practi- 
cally no such thing as employers' liability for ac- 
cidents to the workers ; there is no legislation worthy 
of mention relating to the occupations which have 
been classified as " dangerous" in most industrially 
developed countries ; women workers are sadly neg- 
lected. Whenever a law is passed of distinct advan- 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 155 

tage to the workers, a servile judiciary has been ready 
to render it null and void by declaring it to be uncon- 
stitutional. No more powerful blows have ever 
been directed against the workers than those which 
have been directed by the judiciary. Injunction 
upon injunction has been issued, robbing the workers 
of the most elemental rights of manhood and citizen- 
ship. They have forbidden what the Constitution 
and statute law declare to be legal. 

Mr. John Mitchell refers in his Organized Labor 
to this subject, in strong but not too strong terms. 
"No weapon," he says, "has been used with such 
disastrous effect against trade unions as the injunc- 
tion in labor disputes. By means of it, trade union- 
ists have been prohibited under severe penalties from 
doing what they had a legal right to do, and have 
been specifically directed to do what they had a legal 
right not to do. It is difficult to speak in measured 
tones or moderate language of the savagery and 
venom with which unions have been assailed by the 
injunction, and to the working classes, as to all fair- 
minded men, it seems little less than a crime to con- 
done or tolerate it." * This is strong language, but 
who shall say that it is too strong when we remem- 
ber the many injunctions which have been hurled at 
organized labor since the famous Debs case brought 
this new and terrible weapon into requisition? 

1 Organized Labor, by John Mitchell, page 324. 



156 SOCIALISM 

Members of the International Cigarmakers' Union, 
in New York City, were enjoined some six years ago, 
by Justice Freeman, from approaching the employers 
against whom they were striking, even with a view 
to arranging a peaceable settlement. There was 
no breach of the peace, actual or threatened, to 
justify such a monstrous use of judicial power. The 
cigar makers were also enjoined from publishing 
their grievances, notwithstanding that all the time 
the employers were publishing their side of the 
controversy. In the great steel strike, five years 
ago, the members of the Amalgamated Association 
of Iron and Steel Workers were enjoined from peace- 
ably discussing the merits of their claim with the 
men who were at work, even though the latter might 
raise no objection. In the strike of the Interna- 
tional Typographical Union against the Buffalo Ex- 
press, the strikers were enjoined from discussing the 
strike or talking about the paper in any way which 
might be construed as being against the paper. 
If one of the strikers advised a friend, or requested 
him, not to buy a "scab" paper, he was liable under 
the terms of that injunction. The members of the 
same union were, by Justice Bookstaver, on the 
application of the New York Sun, enjoined from 
publishing their side of the controversy as an argu- 
ment why persons friendly to organized labor should 
not advertise in a paper hostile to it. To-day, as 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 157 

these lines are being written/ the New York daily 
papers contain the text of an injunction, issued by Su- 
preme Court Justice Gildersleeve, enjoining members 
of the same union from " making any requests, giving 
any advice, or resorting to any persuasion ... to 
overcome the exercise of the free will of any person 
connected with the plaintiff [a notorious anti-union- 
ist publishing company] or its customers as em- 
ployees or otherwise." These are only a few of 
thousands of injunctions, hundreds of them equally 
monstrous and subversive of all sound principles of 
popular government. There is not another country 
in the world where such judicial tyranny would be 
tolerated. It is not without significance that in West 
Virginia, where, in 1898, the legislature passed a 
law limiting the right to issue injunctions, the Su- 
preme Court decided that the law was unconstitu- 
tional, on the ground that the legislature had no 
right to attempt to restrain the courts which were 
coordinate with itself. 

Even more dangerous to organized labor than the 
injunction is what is popularly known as "Taff Vale 
law." Our judges have not been slow to follow the 
lines laid down by English judges in the famous case 
of the TafT Vale Railway Company against the of- 
ficers of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Ser- 

1 January 31, 1906. 



158 SOCIALISM 

vants, a powerful labor organization. The decision 
in that case was most revolutionary. It compelled 
the workers to pay damages, to the extent of $115,000, 
to the railroad company for losses sustained by the 
company through a strike of its employees, members 
of the defendant union. That decision struck terror 
and consternation into the hearts of British trade 
unionists. At last they had to face a mode of attack 
almost, if not altogether, as dangerous as that of the 
injunction which their transatlantic brethren had so 
long been facing. 

Taff Vale law could not for long be confined to 
England. Ever on the alert, our American capitalists 
decided to follow the example set by the English 
railroad company. A suit was instituted against 
members of a lodge of the Machinists' Union in Rut- 
land, Vermont, and the defendants were ordered to pay 
$2500. A writ was served upon every other man in 
the lodge, and the property of every one of them 
attached. Since that time, numerous other deci- 
sions of a like nature have been rendered in various 
parts of the country. Thus the unions have been 
assailed in a vital place, their treasuries. It is 
manifestly quite useless for the members of a union 
to strike against an employer for any purpose what- 
ever, if the employer is to be able to recover damages 
from the union. Taff Vale judge-made law renders 
unionism hors de combat at a stroke. 



THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY 159 

IX 

The immediate effect produced upon the minds 
of the workers of England by the revolutionary- 
decision manifested itself in a cry for independent 
political action by the unions. There is a con- 
census of opinion that the tremendous increase in 
the labor and Socialist vote at the recent elections 
was due, largely, to the attack made upon the funds 
of the unions. The aim of the workers there is to 
get legislation enacted for the protection of the 
funds of their unions. A similar process is going 
on in this country. Colorado "bull pens/' anti- 
democratic, anti-American, anti-everything-decent 
injunctions, and transplanted Taff Vale decisions, 
are educating the workers to the acceptance of po- 
litical Socialism. Underneath the thin veneer of 
party differences, the worker sees the class identity 
of the great political parties, and cries out, "A 
plague on both your houses!" The Socialist argu- 
ment comes to the workingman with twofold force; 
he has it in his power to control that government, 
to make it what he will; he can put an end to gov- 
ernment by injunctions, to bull pens, and to the 
sequestration of union funds, whenever he makes 
up his mind to do it. He can make the government 
what he will; if he so decides, he can own and con- 
trol the government, and, through the government, 



160 SOCIALISM 

own and control the essentials of life: be master of 
his own labor, his own bread, his own life. 

If we take for granted that the universal increase 
of Socialist sentiment, and the growth of political 
Socialism, presage this great triumph of the working 
class; that the heretofore despised and oppressed 
proletariat is, in a not far-off future, to rule instead 
of being ruled, the question arises, will the last state 
be better than the first? Will society be bettered 
by the change of masters? To regard this struggle 
of the classes as one of revenge, of exploited masses 
ready to overturn the social structure that they may 
become exploiters instead of exploited, is to mis- 
read the whole movement. The political and eco- 
nomic conquest of society by the working class means 
the end of class divisions, once and forever. A so- 
cial democracy, a society in which all the means of 
the common life are owned and controlled by the 
people in common, democratically organized, pre- 
cludes the existence of class divisions in our present- 
day economic and political sense. Profit, through 
human exploitation, alone has made class divisions 
possible; and the Socialist regime will abolish profit. 
The working class in emancipating itself, at the same 
time makes liberty possible for the whole race of 
man. 



CHAPTER VII 

KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 
I 

The first approach to a comprehensive treatment 
of the materialistic conception of history appeared 
in 1847, several months before the publication of the 
Manifesto, in La Misere de la Philosophie, 1 the fa- 
mous polemic with which Marx assailed Proudhon's 
La Philosophie de la Misere. Marx had worked out 
his theory at least two years before, so Engels tells 
us, and in his writings of that period there are many 
evidences of the fact. In La Misere de la Philo- 
sophie the theory is fundamental to the work, and 
not merely the subject of incidental allusion. This 
little book, all too little known in England and 
America, is therefore important from this historical 
point of view. In it, Marx for the first time shows 
his complete confidence in the theory. It needed 
confidence little short of sublime to challenge Prou- 
dhon in the audacious manner of this scintillating 

1 An English edition of this work, translated by H. Quelch, was 
published in 1900 with the title The Poverty of Philosophy. 
M 161 



162 SOCIALISM 

critique. The torrential eloquence, the scornful sa- 
tire, and fierce invective of the attack upon Proudhon, 
have rather tended to obscure for readers of a 
later generation the real merit of the book, the im- 
portance of the fundamental idea that history must 
be interpreted in the light of economic development, 
that economic evolution determines social fife. The 
book is important also for two other reasons. First, 
it was the author's first serious essay in economic 
science — in the Preface he boldly calls himself an 
economist — and, second, in it appears a full and 
generous recognition of that brilliant coterie of 
English Socialist writers of the Ricardian school 
from whom Marx has been unjustly, and almost 
spitefully, charged with " pillaging" his principal 
ideas. 

What led Marx to launch out upon the troubled 
sea of economic science, when all his predilections 
were for the study of pure philosophy, was the fact 
that his philosophical studies had led him to a point 
where further progress was impossible, except by 
way of economics. The Introduction to A Contri- 
bution to the Critique of Political Economy makes this 
perfectly clear. Having decided that "The method 
of production in material existence conditions social, 
political, and mental evolution in general," a study 
of economics, and especially an analysis of modern 
industrial society, became inevitable. During the 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 163 

year 1845, when the theory of the economic inter- 
pretation of history was absorbing his attention, 
Marx spent six weeks in England with his friend 
Engels, and became acquainted with the work of 
the English Ricardian Socialists referred to. 1 Engels 
had been living in England about three years at this 
time, and had made an exhaustive investigation of 
industrial conditions there, and become intimately 
acquainted with the leaders of the Chartist move- 
ment. His fine library contained most of the works 
of contemporary writers, and it was thus that Marx 
came to know them. 

Foremost of this school of Socialists which had 
arisen, naturally enough, in the land where capi- 
talism flourished at its best, were William Godwin, 
Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas 
Hodgskin, and John Francis Bray. With the 
exception of Hall, of whose privately printed book, 
The Effects of Civilisation on the People of the Euro- 
pean States, 1805, he seems not to have known, 
Marx was familiar with the writings of all the fore- 
going, and his obligations to Thompson, Hodgskin, 
and Bray were not slight. While the charge, made 
by Dr. Anton Menger, 2 among others, that Marx 
took his theory of surplus value from Thompson 

1 Cf. F. Engels' Preface to La Misere de la Philosophic, English 
translation, The Poverty of Philosophy, page iv. 

2 Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 1899. 



164 SOCIALISM 

is absurd, and rests, as Bernstein has pointed out, 1 
upon nothing but the fact that Thompson used the 
words " surplus value" frequently, but not in the 
same sense that Marx uses them, we need not at- 
tempt to dispute the fact that Marx gleaned much 
of value from Thompson and the other two writers 
named. While criticising them, and pointing out 
their shortcomings, Marx himself frequently pays 
tributes of respect to each of them. His indebted- 
ness to either of them, or to all of them, consists sim- 
ply in the fact that he recognized the germ of truth in 
their writings, and saw what they failed to perceive. 
Godwin's most important work, An Inquiry 
Concerning Political Justice, appeared in 1793, 
and contains the germ of much that is called Marx- 
ian Socialism. In it may be found the broad lines 
of the thought which marks much of our present-day 
Socialist teaching, especially the criticism of capi- 
talist society. Marx, however, does not appear 
to have been directly influenced by it. That he was 
influenced by it indirectly, through William Thomp- 
son, Godwin's most illustrious disciple, is, however, 
quite certain. Thompson wrote several works of 
a Socialist character, of which An Inquiry into the 
Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Con- 
ducive to Human Happiness, applied to the newly 

1 Edward Bernstein, Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer, 
page ix. 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 165 

proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, 
1824, and Labour Rewarded. The Claims of Labour 
and Capital Conciliated, or how to secure to Labour 
the Whole Products of its Exertions, 1827, are the 
most important and best known. Thompson must 
be regarded as one of the greatest precursors of 
Marx in the development of modern Socialist theory. 
A Ricarclian of the Ricardians, he states the law of 
wages in language that is almost as emphatic as 
Lassalle's famous Ehernes Lohngesetz. Accepting 
the view of Ricardo, — and indeed, of Adam Smith 
and other English economists — that labor is the 
sole source of exchange value, 1 he shows the exploi- 
tation of the laborer, and uses the term " surplus 
value," not, however, in the sense in which Marx 
uses it. 

John Gray's A Lecture on Human Happiness, 
published in 1825, has been described by Professor 
Foxwell 2 as being " certainly one of the most re- 
markable of Socialist writings," and the summary of 
the rare little work which he gives amply justifies 
the description. Gray published other works of 
note, two of which, The Social System, a Treatise 

1 It should be pointed out here, I think, that Ricardo hedged this 
doctrine about with important qualifications till it no longer remained 
the simple proposition stated above. See Dr. A. C. Whitaker's 
History and Criticism of the Labour Theory of Value in English 
Political Economy, page 57, for a suggestive treatment of this point. 

2 Introduction to Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce oj 
Labour. 



166 SOCIALISM 

on the Principle of Exchange, 1831, and Lectures on 
the Nature and Use of Money, 1848, Marx subjects 
to a rigorous criticism in A Contribution to the Cri- 
tique of Political Economy. Thomas Hodgskin's 
best-known works are Labour Defended against the 
Claims of Capital, 1825, and The Natural and Arti- 
ficial Right of Property Contrasted, 1832. The former, 
which Marx calls "an admirable work," is only a 
small tract of thirty-four pages, but its influence in 
England and in America was very great. Hodgskin 
was a man of great culture and erudition, with a genius 
for popular writing upon difficult topics. It is in- 
teresting to know that in a letter to his friend, Fran- 
cis Place, he sketched a book which he proposed 
writing, "curiously like Marx's Capital" according 
to Place's biographer, Mr. Wallas, 1 and which the 
conservative old reformer dissuaded him from 
writing. John Francis Bray was a journeyman 
printer about whom very little is known. His 
Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy published 
in Leeds in 1839, Marx calls a "remarkable work," 
and in his attack upon Proudhon he quotes from it 
extensively to show that Bray had anticipated the 
French writer's theories. 2 

1 The Life of Francis Place, by Graham Wallas, M.A., London, 
1898, page 268. 

2 For this brief sketch of the works of these writers I have drawn 
freely upon Dr. Anton Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce of 
Labour, and Professor Foxwell's Introduction thereto. 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 167 

The justification for this lengthy digression from 
the main theme of the present chapter lies in the 
fact that many critics have sought to fasten the 
charge of dishonesty upon Marx, and claimed that 
the ideas with which his name is associated were 
taken by him, without acknowledgment, from these 
English Ricardian Socialists. As a matter of fact, 
no economist of note ever quoted his authorities 
with more generous frankness than Marx, and it 
is exceedingly doubtful whether the names of the 
precursors whose ideas he is accused of stealing 
would be even known to his critics but for his frank 
recognition of them. No candid reader of Marx 
can fail to notice that he is most careful to show 
how nearly these writers approached the truth as he 
conceived it. 



II 



When the February revolution of 1848 broke out, 
Marx was in Brussels. The authorities there com- 
pelling him to leave Belgian soil, he returned to 
France, but not for a long stay. The revolutionary 
struggle in Germany stirred his blood, and with 
Engels, Wilhelm Wolf, 1 and Ferdinand Freiligrath, 
the poet of the movement, he started the New 

1 An intimate friend, to whom Marx dedicated the first volume of 
Capital. 



168 SOCIALISM 

Rhenish Gazette. Unlike the first Rhenish Gazette, the 
new journal was absolutely free. Twice Marx was 
summoned to appear at the Cologne Assizes, upon 
charges of inciting the people to rebellion, and each 
time he defended himself with superb skill and 
audacity and was acquitted. But in June, 1849, 
the authorities suppressed the paper, because of the 
support it gave to the risings in Dresden and the 
Rhine Province. Marx was expelled from Prussia 
and once more sought refuge in Paris, which he was 
allowed to enjoy only for a very brief time. For- 
bidden by the French government to stay in Paris, 
or any other part of France except Bretagne, which, 
says Liebknecht, was considered fireproof, Marx 
turned to London, the mecca of all political exiles, 
arriving there toward the end of June, 1849. 

His removal to London was one of the crucial 
events of the life of Marx. It became possible for 
him, in the classic land of capitalism, to pursue his 
economic studies in a way that was not possible 
anywhere else in the world. As Liebknecht says: 
"Here in London, the metropolis (mother city) 
and the center of the world, and of the world of 
trade — the watch tower of the world whence the 
trade of the world and the political and economical 
bustle of the world may be observed, in a way im- 
possible in any other part of the globe — here, 
Marx found what he sought and needed, the bricks 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 169 

and mortar for his work. Capital could be created 
in London only." 1 

Already much more familiar with English political 
economy than most English writers, and with the 
fine library of the British Museum at his command, 
Marx felt that the time had at last arrived when he 
could devote himself to his long-cherished plan of 
writing a great treatise upon political economy 
upon which the theoretical structure of the Social- 
ist movement could be safely and securely based. 
With this object in view, he resumed his economic 
studies in 1850, soon after his arrival in London. 
The work proceeded slowly, however, principally 
owing to the long and bitter struggle with poverty 
which encompassed Marx and his gentle wife. For 
years they suffered all the miseries of acute poverty, 
and even afterward, when the worst was past, the 
principal source of income, almost the only source in 
fact, was the five dollars a week received from the 
New York Tribune, for which Marx acted as special 
correspondent, and to which he contributed some of 
his finest work. 2 There are few pictures more 
pathetic, albeit also heroic, than that which we 



1 Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, 
translated by E. Untermann, 1901, page 32. 

2 Much of this work has been collated and edited by Marx's 
daughter, the late Mrs. Eleanor Marx Aveling, and her husband, Dr. 
Edward Aveling, and published in two volumes, The Eastern Ques- 
tion and Revolution and Counter-Revolution. 



170 SOCIALISM 

have of the great thinker and his devoted wife strug- 
gling against poverty during the first few years of 
their stay in London. Often the little family suf- 
fered the pangs of hunger, and Marx and his fellow- 
exiles used to resort to the reading room of the Brit- 
ish Museum, weak from lack of food very often, 
but grateful for the warmth of that hospitable spot. 
The family lived in two small rooms in a cheap 
lodging house on Dean Street, for some years, the 
front room serving as reception room and study, 
and the back room serving for everything else. In 
a diary note, Mrs. Marx has herself left us an im- 
pressive picture of the suffering of those early 
years in London. Early in 1852, death entered 
the little household for the first time, taking away 
a little daughter. Only a few weeks later an- 
other little daughter died, and Mrs. Marx wrote 
concerning this event: — 

"On Easter of the same year — 1852 — our poor 
little Francisca died of severe bronchitis. Three 
days the poor child was struggling with death. It 
suffered so much. Its little lifeless body rested in 
the small back room; we all moved together into 
the front room, and when night approached, we 
made our beds on the floor. There the three living 
children were lying at our side, and we cried about 
the little angel, who rested cold and lifeless near us. 
The death of the dear child fell into the time of the 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 171 

most bitter poverty . . . (the money for the burial 
of the child was missing). — I went to a French 
refugee living in the vicinity, who had visited us 
shortly before. 

"He at once gave me two pounds sterling, with 
the friendliest sympathy. With this money, the 
little coffin was purchased in which my poor child 
now slumbers peacefully. It had no cradle when it 
entered the world, and the last little abode also was 
for a long time denied it. What did we suffer, when 
it was carried away to its last place of rest !" * 

The poverty, of which we have here such a graphic 
view, lasted for several years beyond the publication 
of the Critique, on to the publication of the first 
volume of Capital. When this struggle is remem- 
bered and understood, it becomes easier to appre- 
ciate the life work of the great Socialist thinker. 
As this is the last place in which the personality of 
Marx, or his personal affairs, will be discussed at 
any length in the present work, a further word con- 
cerning his family life may not be out of place. Those 
persons who regard Socialism as being antagonistic 
to the marriage relation, and fear it in consequence, 
will find no suggestion of support for that view in 
the life of Marx. The love of Marx and his wife 
for one another was beautiful and idylic; a true 
account of their love and devotion would rank with 

1 Quoted by Liebknecht, Memoirs, page 177. 



172 SOCIALISM 

the most beautiful love stories in literature. Their 
friends understood that, too, and there is a world 
of significance in the one brief sentence spoken by 
Engels, when told of the death of his friend's wife, 
who was likewise his own dear friend; "Mohr 
[Negro, a nickname given to Marx by his friends] 
is dead too," he said simply. It was indeed true. 
Though he lingered on for about three months after 
her death, the life of Marx really ended when the 
playmate of his boyhood, and the lover and com- 
panion of his later years, died with the name of her 
dear "Karl" upon her lips. 



Ill 



The studious years spent in the reading room of 
the British Museum completed the anglicization of 
Marx. Capital is essentially an English work, the 
fact of its being written in German, by a German 
writer, being merely incidental. No more distinc- 
tively English treatise on political economy was ever 
written, not even the Wealth of Nations. Even the 
method and style of the book are, contrary to gen- 
eral opinion, much more distinctly English than 
German. Capital was the child of English indus- 
trial conditions and English thought, born by chance 
upon German soil. 

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 173 

English economic thought was entirely dominated 
by the ideas and method of Ricardo, who has been 
described by Senior, not without justice, as "the 
most incorrect writer who ever attained philosoph- 
ical eminence." * So far as looseness in the use 
of terms can justify such a sweeping criticism, it 
is justified by Ricardo's failing in this respect. That 
he should have attained the eminence he did, domi- 
nating English economic thought for many years, 
in spite of the confusion which his loose and uncer- 
tain use of words occasioned, is not less a tribute to 
Ricardo's genius than evidence of the poverty of 
political economy in England at that time. In 
view of the constant and tiresome reiteration of the 
charge that Marx pillaged his labor-value theory 
from Thompson, Hodgskin, Bray, or some other 
more or less obscure writer of the Ricarclian Social- 
ist school, it is well to remember that there is noth- 
ing to be found in the works of any of these writers 
connected with the theory of value which is not to 
be found in the earlier work of Ricardo himself. 
In like manner, the theory can be traced back from 
Ricardo to the master he honored, Adam Smith. 
Furthermore, almost a century before the appear- 
ance of the Wealth of Nations, Sir William Petty 
had anticipated the so-called Ricardian labor-value 
theory of Smith and his followers. 

1 Political Economy, page 115. 



174 SOCIALISM 

Petty, rather than Smith, is entitled to be regarded 
as the founder of the classical school of political 
economy, and Cossa justly calls him, "one of the 
most illustrious forerunners of the science of sta- 
tistical research." * He may indeed fairly be called 
the father of statistical science, and was the first 
to apply statistics, or "political arithmetick," as 
he called it, to the elucidation of political economy. 
He boasts that "instead of using only comparative 
and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, " 
his method is to speak "in Terms of Number, Weight, 
or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense; and 
to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foun- 
dations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon 
the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Pas- 
sions of particular Men, to the Consideration of 
others." 2 The celebrated saying of this sagacious 
thinker that, "labor is the father and active prin- 
ciple of wealth; lands are the mother," is quite 
Ricardian. Petty divided the population into two 
classes, the productive and non-productive, and 
insisted that the value of all things depends upon 
the labor it costs to produce or obtain them. These 
are the ideas Marx is accused of taking, with- 
out acknowledgment, from comparatively obscure 

1 Luigi Cossa, Guide to the Study of Political Economy, English 
translation, 1880. 

2 The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, edited by Charles 
Henry Hull, Vol. I, page 244. 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 175 

followers of Ricardo, in spite of the fact that he 
gives abundant credit to the earlier writer. It 
has been asked with ample justification whether 
these critics of Marx have ever read the works of 
Marx or his predecessors. 

Adam Smith, who accepted the foregoing prin- 
ciples laid down by Petty, followed his example of 
basing his opinions upon observed facts instead of 
abstractions. It is not the least of Smith's merits 
that, despite his many digressions, looseness of 
phraseology, and other admitted defects, his love 
for the concrete kept his feet upon the solid ground 
of fact. With his successors, notably Ricardo and 
J. S. Mill, it was far otherwise. They made political 
economy an isolated study of abstract doctrines. 
Instead of a study of the meaning and relation of 
facts, it became a cult of abstractions, and the aim 
of its teachers seemed to be to render the science 
as little scientific, and as dull, as possible. They 
set up an abstraction, an " economic man/' and 
created for it a world of economic abstractions. 
It is impossible to read either Ricardo or John Stuart 
Mill, but especially the latter, without feeling the 
artificiality of the superstructures they created, 
and the justice of Carlyle's description of such 
political economy as the "dismal science." With 
a realism greater even than Adam Smith's, and a 
more logical method than John Stuart Mill's, Marx 



176 SOCIALISM 

restored the science of political economy to its old 
fact foundations. 

IV 

The superior insight of Marx is shown in the very 
first sentence of his great work. The careful reader 
at once perceives that the first paragraph of the book 
strikes a keynote which distinguishes it from all 
other economic works. Marx was a great master 
of the art of luminous and exact definition and 
nowhere is this more strikingly shown than in this 
opening sentence of Capital: "The wealth of those 
societies in which the capitalist mode of production 
prevails presents itself as an immense accumula- 
tion of commodities, its unit being a single commod- 
ity." * In this simple, lucid sentence, the theory 
of social evolution is clearly implied. The author 
repudiates, by implication, the idea that it is possible 
to lay down universal or eternal laws, and limits 
himself to the exploration of the phenomena ap- 
pearing in a certain stage of historical develop- 
ment. We are not to have another abstract eco- 
nomic man with a world of abstractions all his own ; 
lone, shipwrecked mariners upon barren islands, 
imaginary communities nicely adapted for demon- 
stration purposes in college class rooms, and all 
the other stage properties of the political econo- 

1 The italics are mine. — J. S. 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 177 

mists, are to be entirely discarded. Our author 
does not propose to give us a code of principles by 
which we shall be able to understand and explain 
the phenomena of human society at all times and in 
all places — the Israel of the Mosaic Age, the no- 
madic life of Arab tribes, Europe in the Middle Ages, 
and England in the nineteenth century. 

In effect, the passage under consideration says: 
"Political economy is the study of the principles 
and laws governing the production and distribution 
of wealth. Because of the fact that in the progress 
of society different systems of wealth production 
and exchange, and different concepts of wealth, 
prevail at different times, and in various places at 
the same time, we cannot apply any laws, however 
carefully formulated, to all times and to all places. 
We must choose for study and examination a cer- 
tain form of production, representing a particular 
stage of historical development, and be careful not 
to apply any of its laws to other forms of production, 
representing other stages of development. We 
might have chosen to investigate the laws which 
governed the production of wealth in the ancient 
Babylonian Empire, or in Mediaeval Europe, had 
we so desired, but we have chosen instead the period 
in which we live." 

This that we call the capitalist epoch has grown 
out of the geographical discoveries and the mechan- 



178 SOCIALISM 

ical inventions of the past three hundred years, 
especially the mechanical discoveries of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Its chief char- 
acteristic, from an economic point of view, is that 
of production for sale instead of direct use as in ear- 
lier stages of social development. Of course, barter 
and sale are much older than this epoch which we 
are discussing. In all ages men have exchanged 
their surplus products for other things more desirable 
to them, either directly by barter or through some 
medium of exchange. In the very nature of things, 
however, such exchange as this must have been 
incidental to the life of the people engaging in it, 
and not its principal aim. Under such conditions 
of society wealth consists in the possession of useful 
things. The naked savage, so long as he possessed 
plenty of weapons, and could get an abundance of 
fish or game, was, from the viewpoint of the society 
in which he lived, a wealthy man. In other words, 
the wealth of pre-capitalist society consisted in the 
possession of use-values, and not of exchange values. 
Robinson Crusoe, for whom the very possibility 
of exchange did not exist, was, from this pre-capi- 
talistic point of view, a very wealthy man. 

In our present society, production is carried on 
primarily for exchange, for sale. The first and essen- 
tial characteristic feature of wealth in this stage of 
social development is that it takes the form of accu- 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 179 

mulated exchange-values, or commodities. Men are 
accounted rich or poor according to the exchange- 
values they can command, and not according to the 
use-values they can command. To use a favorite 
example, the man who owns a ton of potatoes is 
far richer in simple use-values than the man whose 
only possession is a sack of diamonds, but, because 
in present society a sack of diamonds will exchange 
for an almost infinite quantity of potatoes, the 
owner of the diamonds is much wealthier than the 
owner of the potatoes. The criterion of wealth in 
capitalist society is exchangeable value as opposed 
to use-value, the criterion of wealth in primitive 
society. The unit of wealth is therefore a commod- 
ity, and we must begin our investigation with it. 
If we can analyze the nature of a commodity so that 
we can understand how and why it is produced, and 
how and why it is exchanged, we shall be able to 
understand the principle governing the production 
and exchange of wealth in this and every other 
society where similar conditions prevail, where, that 
is to say, the unit of wealth is a commodity. 



It has become fashionable in recent years to sneer 
at the term " scientific" which has been commonly 
applied to Marxian Socialism. Even some of the 



180 SOCIALISM 

friendliest critics of Socialism have contended that 
the use of the term is pretentious, bombastic, and 
altogether unjustified. From a certain point of 
view, this appears to be an exceedingly unimportant 
matter, and the vigor with which Socialists defend 
their use of the term seems exceedingly foolish, 
and accountable for only as a result of enthusiastic 
fetish worship — the fetish, of course, being Marx. 
Such a view is exceedingly crude and superficial. 
It cannot be doubted that the Socialism represented 
by Marx and the modern Socialist movement is 
radically different from the earlier Socialism with 
which the names of Fourier, Saint -Simon, Cabet, 
Owen, and a host of other builders of " cloud palaces 
for an ideal humanity," are associated. The need 
of some word to distinguish between the two is ob- 
vious, and the only question remaining is whether 
or not the word " scientific" is the most suitable 
and accurate one to make that distinction clear; 
whether the words "scientific" and " Utopian" 
express with reasonable accuracy the nature of the 
difference. Here the followers and champions of 
Marx feel that they have taken an impregnable 
position. The method of Marx is scientific. From 
the first sentence of his great work to the last, the 
method pursued is that of a painstaking scientist. 
It would be just as reasonable to complain of the use 
of the term "scientific" in connection with the work 



KARL MARX AND ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 181 

of Darwin and his followers, to distinguish it from 
the guesswork of Anaximander, as to cavil at the 
distinction made between the Socialism of Marx 
and his followers, and that of visionaries like Owen 
and Saint-Simon. 

If to recognize a law of causation, to put exact 
knowledge of facts above tradition or sentiment, to 
gather facts patiently until sufficient have been 
gathered together to make possible the formulation 
of generalizations and laws which enable us to fore- 
tell with tolerable certainty what the outcome of 
certain conditions will be — as Marx foretold the 
culmination of competition in monoply — consti- 
tutes scientific method, then Karl Marx was a scien- 
tist and modern Socialism is aptly named Scientific 
Socialism. 



CHAPTER VIII 

OUTLINES OF THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 



The geist of social and political evolution is eco- 
nomic, according to the Socialist philosophy. This 
view of the importance of man's economic relations 
involves a very radical change in the methods and 
terminology of political economy. The philosoph- 
ical view of social and political evolution as a 
world-process, through revolutions formed in the 
matrices of economic conditions, at once limits and 
expands the scope of political economy. It destroys 
on the one hand the idea of the eternality of eco- 
nomic laws and limits them to particular epochs. On 
the other hand, it enhances the importance of the 
science of political economy as a study of the motive 
force of social evolution. With Marx and his fol- 
lowers, political economy is more than an analysis 
of the production and distribution of wealth; it 
is a study of the principal determinant factor in the 
social and political progress of society, consciously 
recognized as such. 

182 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 183 

The sociological viewpoint appears throughout 
the whole structure of Marxian economic thought. 
It appears, for instance, in the definition of a com- 
modity as the unit of wealth in those Societies in 
which the capitalist mode of production prevails. 1 
Likewise wealth and capital connote special social 
relations or categories. Wealth, which in certain 
simpler forms of social organization consists in the 
ownership of use-values, under the capitalist sys- 
tem consists in the ownership of exchange-values. 
Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between 
persons established through the medium of things. 
Robinson Crusoe's spade, the Indian's bow and 
arrow, and all similar illustrations given by the " or- 
thodox" economists, do not constitute capital any 
more than an infant's spoon is capital. They do 
not serve as the medium of the social relation which 
characterizes the capitalist system of production. 
The essential feature of capitalist society is the 
production of wealth in the commodity form; that 
is to say, in the form of objects that, instead of being 
consumed by the producer, are destined to be ex- 
changed or sold at a profit. Capital, therefore, is 
wealth set apart for the production of other wealth 
with a view to its exchange at a profit. A house 
may consist of certain definite quantities of bricks, 
timber, lime, iron, and other substances, but similar 

1 Capital, English edition, page 1. 



184 SOCIALISM 

quantities of these substances piled up without plan 
will not constitute a house. Bricks, timber, lime, 
and iron become a house only in certain circum- 
stances, when they bear a given ordered relation 
to each other. "A negro is a negro; it is only under 
certain conditions that he becomes a slave. A cer- 
tain machine, for example, is a machine for spinning 
cotton; it is only under certain defined conditions 
that it becomes capital. Apart from these condi- 
tions, it is no more capital than gold per se is money ; 
capital is a social relation of production." 1 

This sociological principle pervades the whole of 
Socialist economics. It appears in every economic 
definition, and the terminology of the orthodox 
political economists is thereby often given a radi- 
cally different meaning from that originally given 
to it and commonly understood. The student of 
Socialism who fails to appreciate this fact will most 
frequently land in a morass of confusion and dif- 
ficulty; but the careful student who fully under- 
stands it will find it of immense assistance. 

II 

We must begin our analysis of capitalist society 
with an analysis of a commodity. "A commodity 
is," says Marx, "in the first place, an object outside 

1 The People's Marx, by Gabriel Deville, page 288. 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 185 

us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human 
wants of some sort or another. The nature of such 
wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the 
stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither 
are we here concerned to know how the object satis- 
fies these wants, whether directly as means of sub- 
sistence, or indirectly as means of production." * 
But a commodity must be something more than' an 
object satisfying human wants. The manna upon 
which the pilgrim exiles of the Bible story were fed, 
for instance, was not a commodity, though it ful- 
filled the conditions of this first part of our defini- 
tion. In addition, then, to use-value, a commodity 
must possess exchange- value. In other words, it 
must possess a social use-value, a use-value to others, 
and not merely to the producer. 

Use-values may, and often do, exist without eco- 
nomic value, value, that is to say, in exchange. Air, 
for instance, is absolutely indispensable to life, yet 
it is not — except in special, abnormal conditions — 
subject to sale or exchange. With a use-value that 
is beyond computation, it has no exchange-value. 
Similarly, water is ordinarily plentiful, and has no 
economic value; it is not a commodity. A seeming 
contradiction exists in the case of the water supply 
of cities where water for domestic use is commercially 
supplied, but a moment's reflection will show that it 

1 Capital, English edition, pages 1-2. 



186 SOCIALISM 

is not the water, but the social service of bringing it 
to a desired location for the consumer's convenience, 
that represents economic value. Under ordinary cir- 
cumstances, water, like light, is plentiful; its utility 
to man is not due to man's labor, and it has, there- 
fore, no economic value. But in exceptional cir- 
cumstances, in the arid desert, for instance, or in a 
besieged fortress, a millionaire might be willing to 
give all his wealth for a little water, thus making the 
value of what is ordinarily valueless almost infinite. 
Use- value may exist as the result of human labor, but 
unless that use- value is social, if the object produced 
is of no use to any person other than the producer, it 
will have no value in the economic sense. 1 

A commodity must therefore possess two funda- 
mental qualities. It must have a use-value, must 
satisfy some human want or desire; it must also 
have an exchange-value arising from the fact that the 
use-value contained in it is social in its nature and 
exchangeable for other exchange-values. With the 
unit of wealth thus defined, the subsequent study of 
economics is immensely simplified. 

The trade of capitalist society is the exchange of 
commodities against each other through the medium 
of money. Commodities utterly unlike each other 

1 Professor J. S. Nicholson, a rather pretentious critic of Marx, 
has called sunshine a commodity because of its utility, Elements of 
Political Economy, page 24. Upon the same ground, the song of the 
skylark and the sound of ocean waves might be called commodities. 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 187 

in all apparent physical properties, such as size, shape, 
color, weight, substance, use, and so on, are found to 
exchange equally, to have equal value. The question 
immediately arises: What is it that determines the 
relative value of commodities so exchanged ? A dress 
suit and a kitchen range, for example, are very dif- 
ferent commodities possessing no outward semblance 
to each other, yet they may, and actually do, exchange 
upon an equality in the market. To understand the 
reason for this similarity of value of dissimilar com- 
modities, is to understand an important part of the 
mechanism of modern capitalist society. 

Ill 

When all their differences have been carefully 
noted, all commodities have at least one quality in 
common. The dress suit and the kitchen range, 
tooth-picks and snowshoes, pink parasols and sewing 
machines, are unlike each other in every particular 
save one — they are all products of human labor, 
crystallizations of human labor power. Here, then, 
we have the secret of the mechanism of exchange in 
capitalist society. The amount of labor power em- 
bodied in their production in some way is associated 
with the measure of the exchangeable value of the 
commodities. Their relative value to one another 
is determined by the relative amounts of human 



188 SOCIALISM 

labor-power embodied in them, and this is ascer- 
tained by competition and the higgling of the market. 

Stated in this form, that the quantity of human 
labor is the basis and measure of the value of com- 
modities when exchanged against one another, the 
labor theory of value is beautifully simple. At the 
same time, it is open to certain very obvious criti- 
cisms. It would be absurd to contend that the day's 
labor of a coolie laborer is of equal value to the 
day's labor of a highly skilled mechanic, or that the 
day's labor of an incompetent workman is of equal 
value to that of the most proficient. To refute such 
a theory is as beautifully simple as the theory itself. 
In all seriousness, arguments such as these are con- 
stantly used against the Marxian theory of value, 
notwithstanding that they do not possess the slightest 
relation to it. Marxism is very frequently " refuted" 
by those who do not trouble themselves to under- 
stand it. 

The idea that the quantity of labor embodied in 
them is the determinant of the value of commodities 
did not originate with Karl Marx. On the contrary, 
it is one of the great fundamental principles upon 
which all the classical economists are agreed. Sir 
William Petty, for example, in a celebrated passage 
says of the exchange- value of corn: "If a man can 
bring to London an ounce of silver out of the earth 
in Peru in the same time that he can produce a 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 189 

bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the 
other ; now, if by reason of new and more easy mines 
a man can get two ounces of silver as easily as for- 
merly he did one, then the corn will be as cheap at 
ten shillings a bushel as it was before at five shillings 
a bushel, coeteris paribus." * 

Adam Smith, in a well-known passage, says: "The 
real price of everything, what everything really costs 
to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and 
trouble of acquiring it. What everything is really 
worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants 
to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is 
the toil and trouble which it can impose on other 
people. Labor was the first price, the original pur- 
chase money, that was paid for all things. ... If 
among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually 
costs twice the labor to kill a beaver which it does to 
kill a deer, one beaver would naturally be worth or 
exchange for two deer. It is natural that what is 
usually the produce of two days' or two hours' 
labor, should be worth double of what is usually the 
produce of one day's or one hour's labor." 2 

Benjamin Franklin, whose merit as an economist 
Marx recognized, takes this view and regards trade 
as being " nothing but the exchange of labor for 



1 William Petty, A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions (1662), 
page 32. 

2 Wealth of Nations, second Thorold Rogers edition, pages 
31-32. 



190 SOCIALISM 

labor, the value of all things being most justly 
measured by labor." 1 From the writings of almost 
all the great economists of the classical school it 
would be easy to compile a formidable and con- 
vincing volume of similar quotations, equally em- 
phatic, showing that they all took the same view 
that the quantity of human labor embodied in 
commodities determines their exchange- value. One 
further quotation, from Ricardo, must, however, 
suffice : — 

"To convince ourselves that this (quantity of labor) 
is the real foundation of exchangeable value, let us 
suppose any improvement to be made in the means 
of abridging labor in any one of the various processes 
through which the raw cotton must pass before the 
manufactured stockings come to the market to be 
exchanged for other things; and observe the effects 
which will follow. If fewer men were required to 

1 Benjamin Franklin, Remarks and Facts Relative to the American 
Paper Money, 1764, page 267. 

Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist : "The first sensible 
analysis of exchange-value as labor time, made so clear as to seem 
almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New 
World, where the bourgeois relations of production imported, together 
with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up 
its lack of historical traditions with a surplus of humus. That man 
was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of 
modern political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a 
mere youth (A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a 
Paper Currency), and published in 1721." A Contribution to the 
Critique of Political Economy, English translation by N. I. Stone, 
1904, page 62. 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 191 

cultivate the raw cotton, or if fewer sailors were 
employed in navigating, or shipwrights in construct- 
ing, the ship in which it was conveyed to us ; if fewer 
hands were employed in raising the buildings and 
machinery, or if these, when raised, were rendered 
more efficient; the stockings would inevitably fall 
in value, and command less of other things. They 
would fall because a less quantity of labor was neces- 
sary to their production, and would therefore ex- 
change for a smaller quantity of those things in which 
no such abridgment of labor had been made.' 7 1 

It is evident from the foregoing quotations that 
these great writers regarded the quantity of human 
labor spent as the basis of value. It is equally cer- 
tain that they do not sufficiently explain what is 
meant by quantity of human labor. They speak of 
labor as that of individuals, or sets of individuals, 
and, with the exception of Ricardo, do not appear to 
conceive of social labor. It is because they fail to 
comprehend social labor that they fail to satisfac- 
torily solve the problem of the nature and source of 
value. The difficulties arising from the variations in 
human capacity and productiveness are solved by 
Smith and Ricardo and their followers by insisting 
upon the law of averages. It is the average amount 
of labor expended in killing the beaver which counts, 
not the actual individual labor in a specified case. 

1 David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. 



192 SOCIALISM 

Nor did these writers overlook the important dif- 
ferentiation between simple, unskilled labor and 
labor that is highly skilled. If A in ten hours' 
labor produces exactly double the amount of exchange- 
value which B produces in the same time devoted to 
labor of another kind, it is obvious that the labor of 
B is not equal in value to that of A. Quantity of 
labor must, therefore, be measured by some other 
standard than time units. Despite a hundred pas- 
sages which seem to imply the contrary, Adam Smith 
recognized this very clearly, and attempted to solve 
the riddle by a differentiation of skilled and unskilled 
labor in which he likens skilled labor to a machine; 
and insists that the labor and time spent in acquiring 
the skill which distinguishes skilled labor must be 
reckoned. 1 



IV 



Marx saw the soul of truth in the labor-value 
theory, as propounded by his predecessors, and de- 
voted his wonderful genius to its development and 
systematization. Labor, he pointed out, has two 
sides: the qualitative and the quantitative. The 
qualitative side, the difference in quality between 
specially skilled and simple unskilled labor, is easily 
recognized, though the relative value of the one to 

1 Wealth of Nations, second Thorold Rogers edition, page 106. 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 193 

the other may be somewhat obscure. The secret of 
that obscurity lies hidden in the quantitative side 
of labor. Here we must enter upon an abstract 
inquiry, that part of the Marxian theory of value 
which is most difficult to comprehend. Yet it is 
not very difficult after all to understand that the 
years devoted to learning his trade by a mechanical 
engineer, for instance, during all of which years he 
must be provided with the necessities of life, must be 
reckoned somewhere and somehow; and that when 
they are so reckoned, his day's labor may be found 
to contain an amount of labor time, equivalent to 
two or even several days' simple unskilled labor. 

Marx has been accused of plagiarizing his labor- 
value theory from the Ricardians, but it is surely 
not plagiarism when a thinker sees the germ of truth 
in a theory, and, separating it from the mass of 
confusion and error which envelops it, restates it in 
scientific fashion with all its necessary qualifications. 
Marx developed the idea of social labor which Ricardo 
had propounded. He disregarded individual labor 
entirely, and dealt only with social labor cost. Fur- 
thermore, he recognized the absurdity of the con- 
tention that the value of commodities is determined 
by the amount of labor, individual or social, actually 
embodied in them. If two workers are producing 
precisely similar commodities, say, coats, and one of 
them expends twice as much labor as the other and 



194 SOCIALISM 

uses tools and methods representing twice the social 
labor, it is clearly foolish to suppose that the exchange 
value of his coat will be twice as great as that of the 
other worker, regardless of the fact that their utility 
is equal. The real law of value, then, is that the 
value of commodities is determined by the amount 
of abstract labor embodied in them, or in other 
words by the amount of social human labor necessary, 
on the average, for their production. 

We may conveniently illustrate this theory by a 
single concrete example. Two workmen set to work 
each to make a table. When finished, the tables 
are in all respects alike so that it is impossible to 
distinguish between them. One of the workmen, 
however, takes twice as long as the other to make 
his table. He works with clumsy, old-fashioned 
tools and methods, sawing his boards by hand from 
heavy lumber, and so on. The other workman uses 
superior modern tools and methods, his boards are 
sawn and planed by machinery and all the economies 
of production are used. The amount of labor, not 
only individual labor, but social labor, expended in 
the production of one table, is twice as great as in 
the other. Now, always assuming that their use- 
values are equal, no one will be willing to pay twice 
as much for one table as for the other. If the more 
economical methods of production are those usually 
adopted in the manufacture of tables, then the average 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 195 

value of tables will be determined thereby, and tables 
produced by the slower, less economical process, will 
naturally command only the same price in the mar- 
ket, though embodying twice the amount of actual 
labor. If we reverse the order of this proposition, 
and suppose the slower, less economical methods to 
be those generally prevailing in the manufacture of 
tables, and the quicker, more economical methods to 
be exceptional, then, all other things being equal, 
the exchange-value of tables will be determined by 
the amount of labor commonly consumed, and the 
fortunate producer who adopts the exceptional, 
economical methods will, for a time, reap a golden 
harvest. Only for a time, however. As the new 
methods prevail, competition being the impelling 
force, they become less exceptional, and finally, the 
regular, normal methods of production and the 
standard of value. 

It is this important qualification which is most 
often lost sight of by the critics of the labor theory 
of value. They persist in applying to individual 
commodities the test of the amount of labor-power 
actually consumed in their production, and so con- 
found the Marxian theory with its crude progenitors. 
In refuting this crude theory, they are utterly ob- 
livious of the fact that Marx himself accomplished 
that by no means difficult task. To state the Marxian 
theory accurately, we must qualify the bald state- 



196 SOCIALISM 

ment that the exchange value of commodities is 
determined by the amount of labor embodied in them, 
and state it in the following manner : The exchange 
value of commodities is determined by the amount of 
average labor at the time socially necessary for their 
'production. This is determined, not absolutely in 
individual cases, but approximately in general, by 
the bargaining and higgling of the market, to adopt 
Adam Smith's well-known phrase. 



Most writers do not distinguish between price and 
value with sufficient clearness, using the terms as if 
they were synonymous and interchangeable. Where 
commodities are exchanged directly one for another, 
as in the barter of primitive society, there is no need 
of a price-form to express value. In highly developed 
societies, however, where the very magnitude of pro- 
duction and exchange makes direct barter impossible, 
and where the objects to be exchanged are not com- 
monly the product of individual labor, a medium of 
exchange becomes necessary; a something which is 
generally recognized as a safe and stable commodity 
which can be used to express in terms of its own 
weight, size, shape, or color, the value of other com- 
modities to be exchanged. This is the function of 
money. In various times and places wheat, shells, 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 197 

skins of animals, beads, powder, and a multitude of 
other things, have served as money, but for various 
obvious reasons the precious metals, gold and silver, 
have been most favored. 

In all commercial countries to-day, one or other of 
these metals, or both of them, serves as the recognized 
medium of exchange. They are commodities, also, 
and when we say that the value of a commodity is a 
certain amount of gold, we equally express the value 
of that amount of gold in terms of the commodity in 
question. As commodities, the precious metals are 
subject to the same laws as other commodities. If 
gold should be discovered in such abundance that it 
became as plentiful and easy to obtain as coal, its 
value would be no greater than that of coal. It 
might, conceivably, though it is not probable, still 
be used as the medium of exchange, but it would be 
equal to coal in exchange-value, a ton of the one being 
equal to a ton of the other provided its utility-value 
remained. Since the scarcity of gold is an important 
element in its utility-value, creating and fostering 
the desire for its possession, that utility-value might 
largely disappear if gold became as plentiful as coal, 
in which case it would not have the same value as 
coal, and might cease to be a commodity at all. 

Price, then, is the expression of value in terms of 
some other commodity, which, generally used for 
that purpose of expressing the value of other com- 



198 SOCIALISM 

modities, we call money. It is only an approxima- 
tion of value, and subject to fluctuation to a much 
greater extent than value itself. It may, for a time, 
fall below value or rise above it, but in a free market 
— the only condition in which the operation of any 
economic law may be judged — sooner or later the 
equilibrium will be regained. Where monopoly ex- 
ists, the free market condition being non-existent, 
price may rise far above value. Monopoly-price is 
an artificial elevation of price above value and must 
be considered independently. 

Failure to discriminate between value and its 
price-expression has led to endless difficulty. It 
lies at the bottom of the naive theory that value 
depends upon the relation of supply and demand. 
Lord Lauderdale's famous theory has found much 
support among later economists, though it is now 
rather unpopular when stated in its old, simple form. 
Disguised in the so-called Austrian theory of final 
utility, it has attained considerable vogue. 1 The 

1 See "The Final Futility of Final Utility " in Hyndman's Econom- 
ics of Socialism, for a remarkable criticism of the "final utility" 
theory, showing its identity with the doctrine of supply and demand 
as the basis of value. 

I refer to the theory of final or marginal utility as the "so-called 
Austrian theory" for the purpose of calling attention to the fact that, 
as Professor Seligman has ably and clearly demonstrated, it was con- 
ceived and excellently stated by W. F. Lloyd, Professor of Political 
Economy at Oxford, in 1833. (See the paper, On Some Neglected 
British Economists, in the Economic Journal, V, xiii, pages, 357-363.) 
This was two decades before Gossen and a generation earlier than 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 199 

theory is plausible and convincing to the ordinary 
mind. Every day we see illustrations of its working ; 
prices are depressed when there is an oversupply, 
and elevated when the demand of would-be consumers 
exceeds the supply of the commodities they desire to 
buy. It is not so easy to see that these effects are 
temporary, and that there is an automatic adjust- 
ment at work. Increased demand raises prices for a 
time, but it also calls forth an increase in supply 
which tends to restore the old price level, or may 
even force prices below it. In the latter case, the 
supply falls off and prices find their real level. The 
relation of supply to demand causes an oscillation of 
prices, but it is not the determinant of value. When 
prices rise above a certain level, demand slackens or 
ceases, and prices are inevitably lowered. Prices 
may fall with a decreased demand, but it is clear 
that unless the producers can get a price approxi- 
mately equal to the value of their commodities, they 
will cease to produce them, and the supply will dimin- 
ish or cease altogether. Ultimately, therefore, the 
fluctuations of price through the lack of equilibrium 
between supply and demand adjust themselves, and 
prices must roughly represent values except under 
artificial conditions. Monopoly-price is, of course, 

Menger and Jevons. In view of this fact, the criticisms of Marx for 
his lack of originality by members of the "Austrian" school, is rather 
naive and amusing. 



200 SOCIALISM 

an artificial price only in the sense that the laws of 
free market exchange do not apply to it. 

VI 

Labor, the source and determinant of value, has, 
per se, no value. Only when it is embodied in certain 
forms has it any value. If a man labors hard digging 
holes and refilling them, the result is quite valueless. 
What the capitalist buys, therefore, is not labor but 
labor-power, the ability and will to labor. An excep- 
tion to this is seen in the case of piecework, where 
the employer undertakes to pay for a given amount 
of labor embodied in a certain form, instead of for 
a given amount of labor-time, or labor-power. But 
here, again, it is not labor per se that is bought, but 
labor in a certain form and relation, embodied in a 
commodity. Wages in general is a form of payment 
for certain amounts of labor-power, measured by 
duration and skill. The power and will to labor 
assume the twofold commodity character of use- 
value and exchange- value. Labor-power is a com- 
modity and wages is its price. 

Now, as a commodity labor-power is subject to 
the same laws as all other commodities. Its price, 
wages, fluctuates just as the price of all other com- 
modities do, and bears the same relation to its value. 
It may be temporarily affected by the preponderance 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 201 

of supply over demand, or of demand over supply; 
it may be made the subject of monopoly. There is, 
therefore, no such thing as an "iron law" of wages, 
any more than there is an "iron law" of prices for 
other commodities than labor-power. There is, how- 
ever, this element of truth in Lassalle's famous law 
of wages : as the price of all other commodities tends, 
under normal conditions, to approximate value, so 
the price of labor-power, wages, tends to approxi- 
mate its value. And just as the value of other com- 
modities is determined by the amount of labor 
necessary on an average for their reproduction, so 
the value of labor-power is likewise determined. 
Wages tend to a point at which they will cover the 
average cost of the necessary means of subsistence 
for the workers and their families, in any given time 
and place, under the conditions and according to the 
standard of living generally prevailing. Trade union 
action may force wages above that point, or undue 
stress in the competitive labor market force wages 
below it. While, however, a trade union may bring 
about what is virtually a monopoly-price for the 
labor-power of its members, there is always a counter 
tendency in the other direction, and even toward 
lowering the standard of subsistence itself till it 
reaches an irreducible minimum. 

To class human labor-power with pig iron or bad 
butter as a commodity, subject to the same laws, 



202 SOCIALISM 

may at first seem fantastic to the reader, but a 
careful survey of the facts will fully justify the classi- 
fication. The capacity of the worker to labor de- 
pends upon his securing certain things; his labor- 
power has to be reproduced from day to day, for 
which a certain supply of food, clothing, and other 
necessities of life is essential. Even with these sup- 
plied constantly, the worker sooner or later wears 
out and dies. If the race is not to be extinguished, 
a certain supply of the necessities of life must be pro- 
vided for the children during the years of their de- 
velopment to the point where their labor-power 
becomes marketable. The average cost of production 
in the case of labor-power includes, therefore, the 
necessities for a wife and family as well as for the 
individual worker. 

This living commodity, labor-power, differs in a 
material way from all other commodities, in that 
when it is used up in the process of the production 
of other commodities in which it is embodied, unlike 
machinery and raw materials, it creates new value 
in the process of being used up, and embodies that 
new value in the commodity it assists to produce. 
This is the central idea of the famous and much- 
misunderstood Marxian theory of surplus-value by 
which the method of capitalism, the exploitation of 
the wage-workers, and the resulting class antagon- 
isms of the system are explained. 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 203 

VII 

Earlier writers than Marx, such as Thompson and 
the famous Chartist leader, Bronterre O'Brien, had 
used the term " Surplus Value" to connote profit, 
and it is probable that Marx adopted the term be- 
cause of its wide currency at the time he wrote. 
With these writers, however, surplus-value was simply 
another name for profit ; it did not represent a theory 
of the nature and origin of capitalist income as it did 
later in the hands of Marx, who showed that appro- 
priation of unpaid labor is the real source of profit; 
that even if the capitalist buys the laborer's labor- 
power at its full value as a commodity, he extracts 
from it more value than he paid for, and that thus 
the profits of the capitalist class are derived. The 
surplus-value theory thus becomes the scientific 
groundwork of all the social theories and movements 
protesting against and seeking to end the exploitation 
of the laboring masses. It is the foundation principle 
of the modern political Socialist movement, and to 
understand it is a matter of paramount importance. 

One of the ablest and best-known American So- 
cialist writers briefly and clearly explains the theory 
as follows : * — 

"It is possible for the workers, according to methods 
and under conditions now prevailing, to produce the 

1 Algernon Lee, in The Worker, January 29, 1905. 



204 SOCIALISM 

equivalent of their own day's subsistence in less than 
a full labor day — by less than the full amount of 
labor that they can do in a day. Six hours' labor, 
probably four hours' labor, is sufficient to produce the 
values of a day's subsistence — that is, to reproduce 
the amount of the daily wages, the value of the labor- 
power expended in a day. But the wage-worker 
does not work four or six hours, producing the 
equivalent of his own subsistence, and then go home 
and enjoy himself. On the contrary, he works eight 
or nine or ten hours, and sometimes considerably 
more. He must do this, or he gets no chance to work 
at all. The capitalist owns the factory, and controls 
the opportunities of employment; and the capitalist 
is not in business simply for the purpose of allowing 
his employees to get their living. His motive in 
allowing production to go on is not the workers' 
maintenance by their own labor, but his own main- 
tenance by their labor. His motive is profit. 

"Let us say the average cost of a day's subsistence 
for the workers, according to the existing standard 
of living, is the product of five hours' social labor, 
and that this is represented in money by $1. Wages, 
then, are $1 a day. But the workers perform ten 
hours of labor daily. Here are 1000 such workers 
in a factory. They use up daily $1000 worth of raw 
material. They wear out the plant to the extent of 
$100 a day in so doing. They use up $1000 worth 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 205 

of labor-power in the process, and get that value 
back in wages, $1000. According to our suppositions, 
the gross value of the day's product will be $3100. 
Selling the product at its value, the employer will 
get $3100 for it. 

"Now the whole of this product belongs to the 
capitalist, for the very good reason that all the 
elements that entered into its production — materials, 
machinery, labor-power — belonged to him, he having 
paid for them. 

"Out of that gross product of $3100, the capitalist 
must pay $1000 for the materials used up, $100 for 
repairs and replacement of the machinery, and $1000 
for wages, for labor-power bought and used up — 
$2100 in all. There remains to him $1000, the excess 
of the normal product of 1000 days of labor over the 
value of 1000 days of labor-power, the excess of the 
amount of value produced by 1000 men in 10 hours 
over the amount of value necessary for their suste- 
nance for a day." 

From the surplus of the laborers' product over 
their necessary cost of subsistence, the capitalists 
derive their income. This is the Marxian theory of 
surplus-value in a nutshell. Rent, interest, and 
profit, the three great divisions of capitalist income 
into which this surplus-value is divided, are thus 
traced back to the fundamental exploitation of labor. 
Other economists, both before and since Marx, have 



206 SOCIALISM 

tried to explain the source of capitalist income in 
very different ways. An early theory was that profit 
originates in exchange, through " buying cheap and 
selling dear." That this is so in the case of indi- 
vidual traders is obvious. If A sells to B commodities 
above their value, or buys commodities from him 
below their value, it is plain that he gains by it. But 
it is equally plain that B loses. If one group of 
capitalists loses and another group gains, the gains 
and losses must balance each other; there can be no 
gain to the capitalist class as a whole. Yet that is 
precisely what occurs — the capitalist class as a 
whole does gain, and gain enormously, despite the 
losses of individual members of that class. It is 
that gain to the great body of capitalists, that general 
increase in their wealth, which must be accounted 
for, and which exchange cannot explain. Only when 
we think of the capitalist class buying labor-power 
from outside its own ranks, generally at its natural 
value, and using it, is the problem solved. The com- 
modity, labor-power, which the capitalist buys 
creates a value greater than its own in being used up. 
The theory that profit is the wages of risk is an- 
swerable in substantially the same way. It does not 
in any way explain the increase in the aggregate 
wealth of the capitalist class to say that the indi- 
vidual capitalist must have a chance to receive interest 
upon his money in order to induce him to turn it into 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 207 

capital, to hazard losing it wholly or in part. While 
the theory of risk helps to explain some features of 
capitalism, the changes in the flow of capital into 
certain forms of investment, and, to a small extent, 
the commercial crises incidental thereto, it does not 
explain the vital problem of the source of capitalist 
income. The chances of gain as a premium for the 
risks involved, explain satisfactorily enough the action of 
the gambler when he enters into a game of roulette 
or faro. It cannot be said, however, that the aggre- 
gate wealth of the gamblers is increased by playing 
roulette or faro. Then, too, the risks of the laborers 
are vastly more vital than those of the capitalist. Yet 
the premium for their risks of health and life itself 
does not appear, unless, indeed, it be in their wages, 
in which case the most superficial glance at our in- 
dustrial statistics will show that wages are by no 
means highest in those occupations where the risks 
are greatest. Further, the wages of the risks for 
capitalists and laborers alike are drawn from the 
same source, the product of the laborers' toil. 

To consider, even briefly, all the varied theories of 
surplus-value other than that which arises out of the 
labor theory of value, would be a prolonged, dull, 
and profitless task. The theory of the reward of 
abstinence, that profit is the due and just reward of 
the capitalist for saving part of his we.alth and using 
it as a means of production, is answerable by a priori 



208 SOCIALISM 

arguments and by a vast volume of facts. Absti- 
nence obviously produces nothing; it can only save 
the wealth already produced by labor, and no auto- 
matic increase of that stored wealth is possible. If 
saved-up wealth is to increase without the labor of 
its owner, it can only be through the exploitation of 
the labor of others, so that the abstinence theory 
ultimately proves the Marxist position. On the other 
hand, we see that those whose wealth increases most 
rapidly are not given to frugality or abstinence by 
any means. It is certainly possible for an individual 
by practicing frugality and abstinence to save enough 
to enable him to invest in some profitable enterprise, 
but the origin of his profit is not his abstinence. That 
comes from the value created by human labor-power 
over and above its cost of production. 

Still less satisfactory is the idea that surplus-value 
is nothing more than the "wages of superintendence," 
or the "rent of ability." This theory has been ad- 
vocated with much specious argument. Essentially 
it involves the contention that there is no distinction 
between wages and profits, or between capitalists and 
laborers; that the capitalist is a worker, and his 
profits simply wages for his useful and highly im- 
portant work of directing industry. It is a bold 
theory with a very small basis of fact. Whoever 
honestly considers it, must see that it is absurd and 
untrue. Not only is the larger part of industry 



OUTLINES OF ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM 209 

managed to-day by salaried employees who have no 
part, or only a small part, in the ownership of the 
concerns they manage, but the profits are distributed 
among shareholders who have never contributed 
service of any kind to the industries in which they 
are shareholders. Whatever services are performed 
even by the figurehead, " dummy" directors of 
companies, are paid for before profits are considered 
at all. As Mr. Algernon Lee says : — 

"The profits produced in many American mills, 
factories, mines, and railway systems go in part to 
Englishmen or Belgians or Germans who never set 
foot in America and who obviously can have no share 
in even the mental labor of direction. A certificate 
of stock may belong to a child, to a maniac, to an 
imbecile, to a prisoner behind the bars, and it draws 
profit for its owner just the same. Stocks and bonds 
may lie for months or years in a safe-deposit vault, 
while an estate is being disputed, before their owner- 
ship is determined; but whoever is declared to be 
the owner gets the dividends and interest " earned' ' 
during all that time." * 

Finally, it is not claimed that the whole of the 
surplus-value produced in any enterprise is appro- 
priated by the direct employer. This happens but 
rarely, when the individual employer is the owner 
of all the capital used in the enterprise. As a rule, 

1 The Worker, February 5, 1905. 



210 SOCIALISM 

the employer has to pay rent for the buildings and the 
land he uses, and interest upon borrowed money, 
mortgages, and so on. These payments must come 
out of the surplus-value extracted from the labor 
of the wage-workers employed. How the surplus- 
value which they produce is divided among land- 
lords, moneylenders, creditors, speculators, and actual 
employers is a matter of absolutely no moment or 
interest to the workers as a class. That is why such 
movements as the followers of Mr. Henry George 
represent fail to vitally interest the working class. 1 
The division of the surplus-value wrung from the 
workers' toil gives rise to much quarrel and strife 
within the capitalist class, but the working class 
recognizes, and vaguely feels where it does not clearly 
recognize, that it has no interest in these quarrels. 
All that interests it vitally is how to lessen the ex- 
tent of the exploitation to which it is subjected, and 
how ultimately to end that exploitation altogether. 
Organization along lines of trade unionism can do 
something, but very little, to lessen the extent of 
the exploitation; the socialization of the means of 
production and exchange alone can end it. 

1 It is worthy of note that the taxation of land values, commonly- 
associated with the name of Henry George, was advocated in^the 
Communist Manifesto. 



CHAPTER IX 

OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 



It would be absurd, and contrary to Socialist 
principles, to attempt to give detailed specifications 
of the Socialist state. There are, however, certain 
fundamental principles which are essential to its 
existence. Without them, Socialist society is impos- 
sible. If we can take these principles and correlate 
them, we shall obtain a suggestive outline of the 
Socialist state. So far we may safely proceed with 
full scientific sanction; beyond are the realms of 
fancy and dreams, the Elysian fields of Utopia. 

Society consists of an aggregation of individuals, 
but it is something more than that ; it is an organism, 
though as yet an imperfectly developed one. While 
the units of which it is composed have distinct and 
independent lives within certain limits, they are, 
outside of those limits, interdependent and inter- 
related. Man is governed by two great forces. On 
the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving 
211 



212 SOCIALISM 

to individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a 
social animal, ever seeking association and avoiding 
isolation. This duality expresses itself in the com- 
position of society. There is a struggle between its 
members motived by the desire for individual ex- 
pansion; and, alongside of it, a sense of solidarity, 
a movement to mutual, reciprocal relations, motived 
by the gregarian instinct. All social life is necessarily 
an oscillation between these two motives. The social 
problem in its last analysis is nothing more than the 
problem of combining and harmonizing social and 
individual interests and actions springing there- 
from. 

In dealing with this social problem, the problem 
of how to secure harmony of social and individual 
interests and actions, it is necessary first of all to 
recognize that both the motives named are equally 
important and necessary agents of human progress. 
The idea largely prevails that Socialists ignore the 
individual motive and consider only the social motive, 
just as the ultra-individualists have erred in an oppo- 
site discrimination. The Socialist state has been 
conceived as a great bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave 
humorous and vivid expression to this idea in Punch 
some years ago, when he represented the citizens of 
the Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known 
only by numbers, living in barracks, strangers to all 
the joys of family life, plodding through their allotted 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 213 

tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having 
the solace of chewing gum in their leisure time as a 
specially paternal provision. Some such mental pic- 
ture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's Coming 
Slavery, and it must be confessed that the early forms 
of Socialist propaganda by pictures of imaginary 
cooperative commonwealths afforded some excuse 
for the idea. Most intelligent Socialists, if called 
upon to choose between them, would probably prefer 
to live in Thibet under a personal despotism, rather 
than under the rule of the hierarchies of some of these 
imaginary commonwealths which Utopian Socialists 
have depicted. 

The Socialist ideal may be said to be a form of 
social organization in which every individual will 
enjoy the greatest possible amount of freedom for 
self-development and expression ; and in which social 
authority will be reduced to the minimum necessary 
for the preservation and insurance of that right to 
all individuals. There is an incontestable right of 
the individual to full and free self-development and 
expression. It is not, however, an absolute right, but 
is subject to such restrictions as may be necessary to 
safeguard the like right of another individual, or of 
society as a whole. Absolute personal liberty is not 
possible: to grant it to one individual would be 
equivalent to denying it to others. If, in a certain 
community, a need is commonly felt for a system of 



214 SOCIALISM 

drainage to save the citizens from the perils of a pos- 
sible outbreak of typhoid or some other epidemic 
disease, and all the citizens agree upon a scheme 
except two or three, who, in the name of personal 
liberty, declare that their property must not be 
touched, what is to be clone? If the citizens, out of 
solicitude for the personal liberty of the objecting 
individuals, abandon or modify their plans, is it not 
clear that the liberty of the many has been sacrificed 
to the liberty of the few, which is the essence of 
tyranny ? Absolute individual liberty is incompatible 
with social liberty. The liberty of each must, in 
Mill's phrase, be bounded by the like liberty of all. 
Absolute personal liberty is a chimera, a delusion. 

The dual forces which serve as the motives of 
individual and collective action, spring, unquestion- 
ably, from the fact that individuals are at once alike 
and unlike, equal and unequal. Alike in our needs 
of certain fundamental necessities, such as food, 
clothing, shelter, cooperation for producing these 
necessities, for protection from foes, human and 
other, we are unlike in tastes, temperament, character, 
will, and so on, till our diversity becomes as great and 
as general as our likeness. Now, the problem is to 
insure equal opportunities of full development to all 
these diversely constituted and endowed individuals, 
and, at the same time, to maintain the principle of 
equal obligations to society on the part of every in- 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 215 

dividual. This is the problem of social justice: to 
insure to each the same social opportunities, to secure 
from each a recognition of the same obligations toward 
all. The basic principle of the Socialist state must 
be justice; no privileges or favors can be extended to 
any individuals or groups of individuals. 

II 

Politically, the organization of the Socialist state 
must be democratic. Socialism without democracy 
is as impossible as a shadow without light. The word 
" Socialism " is a monstrous misnomer when applied 
to schemes of paternalism or government ownership 
which lack the essential, vital principle of democracy. 
Justice requires that the legislative power of society 
rest upon universal suffrage and the political equality 
of all men and women, except lunatics and criminals. 
It is manifestly unjust to exact obedience to the laws 
from those who have had no share in making them 
and can have no share in altering them. The only 
exceptions to this principle are (1) minors, children 
not yet arrived at the age of responsibility agreed 
upon by the citizens ; (2) lunatics and certain classes 
of criminals; (3) aliens, non-citizens temporarily 
resident in the state. 

Democracy in the sense of popular self-govern- 
ment, the "government of the people, by the people, 
and for the people," of which political rhetoricians 



216 SOCIALISM 

boast, is only approximately attainable. While all 
can equally participate in the legislative power, all 
cannot participate directly in the administrative 
power, and it becomes necessary, therefore, to adopt 
the principle of delegated authority, representative 
government. Direct legislation by the people might 
be realized through the adoption of the principles of 
popular initiative and referendum, proportional repre- 
sentation, and the right of recall. Indeed, there is 
no apparent reason why all legislation, except tempo- 
rary legislation as in war time, famine, plague, and 
such abnormal conditions, should not be directly 
initiated and enacted, leaving only the just and 
proper enforcement of the law to delegated authority. 
In all the programmes of Socialist parties through- 
out the world, the principles of popular initiative 
and referendum, proportional representation, and the 
right of recalling representatives are included at the 
present time ; not merely as means to secure a greater 
degree of real democracy within the existing social 
system, but also, and primarily, to prepare the re- 
quired political framework of democracy for the 
industrial commonwealth of the future. 

The great political problem for such a society con- 
sists in choosing wisely the trustees of this important 
social function and authority, and seeing that they 
rightly use it for the common good, without abuse, 
either for the profit of themselves or their friends, and 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 217 

without prejudice to any portion of society. There 
is no such thing as an " automatic democracy," and 
eternal vigilance will be the price of liberty under 
Socialism as it has ever been. There can be no other 
safeguard against the usurpation of power than the 
popular will and conscience ever alert upon the 
watch-towers. 

Ill 

With these general principles prevised, we may 
consider, briefly, what are the respective rights of 
the individual and of society. The rights of the 
individual may be summarized as follows: There 
must be perfect freedom of movement, including the 
right to withdraw from the domain of the government, 
to migrate at will to other territories ; immunity from 
arrest, except from infringing others' rights, with 
compensation for improper arrest; respect of the 
privacy of domicile and correspondence; full liberty 
of dress, subject to decency; freedom of utterance, 
whether by speech or publication, subject only to 
the protection of others from insult, injury, or inter- 
ference with their equal liberties. Absolute freedom 
of the individual in all that pertains to art, science, 
philosophy, and religion, and their teaching, or prop- 
aganda, is essential. The state can rightly have 
nothing to do with these matters; they belong to 
the personal life alone. Art, science, philosophy, 



218 SOCIALISM 

and religion cannot be protected by any authority, 
nor is such protection needed. 

In this summary only certainties, imperative, 
essential conditions, have been included. Doubt- 
less many Socialists would considerably extend the 
list of things to be totally exempted from collective 
authority and control. Some, for instance, would 
include the right of the individual to possess and 
bear arms for the defense of person and property. 
On the other hand, it might be objected with good 
show of reason by other Socialists that such a right 
must always be liable to abuses imperiling the peace 
of society, and that the same ends would be served 
more surely if individual armament were made im- 
possible. Other Socialists would include in the 
category of private acts outside the sphere of law 
the union of the sexes. They would do away with 
legal intervention in marriage and make it exclu- 
sively a private concern. On the other hand, again, 
many Socialists, probably an overwhelming ma- 
jority, would object. They would insist that the 
state must, in the interest of the children and for 
its own self-preservation, assume certain respon- 
sibilities for, and exercise a certain control over, 
all marriages. While believing that under Social- 
ism marriage would no longer be subject to economic 
motives — matrimonial markets for titles and for- 
tunes no longer existing — and that the maximum 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 219 

of personal freedom together with the minimum of 
social authority would be possible in the union of 
the sexes, they would still insist upon the necessity 
of that minimum of legal control. While, there- 
fore, our hasty summary by no means exhausts the 
category of personal liberties, it is sufficiently com- 
prehensive to show that individual freedom would 
by no means be crushed out of existence by the 
Socialist state. The intolerable bureaucracy of col- 
lectivism is wholly an imaginary evil. 

In the same general manner, we may summarize 
the principal functions of the state * as follows : 
the state has the right and the power to organize 
and control the economic system, comprehending 
in that term the production and distribution of all 
social wealth wherever private enterprise is danger- 
ous to the social well-being, or is inefficient; the 
defense of the community from invasion, from fire, 
flood, famine, or disease; the relations with other 
states, such as trade agreements, boundary treaties, 
and the like; the maintenance of order, including 
the juridical and police systems in all their branches ; 
and public education in all its departments. It 
will be found that these five groups of functions 
include all the services which the state may properly 
undertake, and that not one of them can be safely 

1 I use the word "state" throughout in its largest, most compre- 
hensive sense as meaning the whole political organization of society. 



220 SOCIALISM 

intrusted to private enterprise. On the other hand, 
it is not necessary to assume that the state must 
have an absolute monopoly of any one of these groups 
of functions to be performed in the social organism. 
It would not be necessary, for example, for the state 
to prohibit its citizens from entering into voluntary 
relations with the citizens of other countries for the 
promotion of friendly international relations, for 
trade reciprocity, and so on. Likewise the juridical 
functions being in the hands of the state would not 
prevent voluntary arbitration. Our study becomes, 
therefore, a study of social physiology. 

The principle already postulated, that the state 
must undertake the production and distribution of 
social wealth wherever private enterprise is danger- 
ous, or less efficient than public enterprise, clarifies 
somewhat the problem of the industrial organiza- 
tion of the Socialist regime, which is a vastly more 
difficult problem than that of its political organiza- 
tion. Socialism by no means involves the suppres- 
sion of all private property and industry ; only when 
these fail in efficiency or result in injustice and in- 
equality of benefits does socialization present itself. 
There are many petty, subordinate industries, es- 
pecially the making of articles of luxury, which might 
be allowed to remain in private hands, subject only 
to such general regulation as might be found neces- 
sary for the protection of health and the public 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 221 

order. On the other hand, there are things, natural 
monopolies, which cannot be justly or efficiently 
used by private enterprise. Land ownership and 
all that depends thereon, such as mining, transpor- 
tation, and the like, must of necessity be collective 
and universal. 1 

In the Socialist state, then, certain forms of pri- 
vate industry will be tolerated, and perhaps even 
definitely encouraged, but the great fundamental 
economic activities will be socialized. The Socialist 
state will not be static and, consequently, what at 
first may be regarded as being properly the subject 
of private enterprise may develop to an extent or 
in directions which necessitate its transformation to 
the category of essentially social properties. Hence, 
when the Socialist state is here spoken of, it is not 
by any means intended to describe the full limits 
of socialization, the fully developed collectivist 
commonwealth, but rather the opposite limits, the 
minimum of socialization ; the conditions essential 
to that stage of social evolution at which it will be 
possible to speak of capitalism as a past and out- 
grown stage, and of the present as the new era of 
Socialism. 

Socialists, naturally, differ upon this point very 
materially. To the present writer, however, it 

1 Of course this does not mean that there must not be private use 
of land. 



222 SOCIALISM 

would seem sufficiently comprehensive to say that 
the economic structure of the new society must 
include at least the following: (1) Ownership of all 
natural resources, such as land, mines, forests, oil 
wells, and so on; (2) operation of all the means of 
transportation and communication other than those 
of purely personal service; (3) operation of all 
industrial production involving large capital and 
associated labor, except where carried on by vol- 
untary, democratic cooperation; (4) organization 
of all labor essential to the public service, such as 
the building of schools, hospitals, docks, roads, 
bridges, sewers, and the like; the construction of 
all the machinery and plant requisite to the social 
production and distribution, and of things necessary 
for the maintenance of those engaged in such public 
services as the national defense and all who are 
wards of the state ; (5) a monopoly of the monetary 
and credit functions, including coinage, banking, 
mortgaging, and the extension of credit to private 
enterprise. With these economic activities under- 
taken by the state, a pure democracy differing vi- 
tally from all the class-dominated states of history, 
private enterprise would by no means be excluded, 
but limited to an extent making the exploitation of 
public interests and needs for private gain impossible. 
Socialism thus becomes the defender of individual 
liberty, not its enemy. 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 223 

IV 

As owner of the earth and all the major instru- 
ments of production and exchange, society would 
occupy a position enabling it to see that the physical 
and mental benefits derived from its wealth, its 
natural resources, its collective experience, genius, 
and labor, were universalized as befits a democ- 
racy.- It would be able to guarantee the right to 
live by labor to all its citizens through preventing 
the monopolization of the land and instruments 
and social opportunities in general. It would be 
in a position to make every development from 
competition to monopoly the occasion for further 
socialization. Thus there would be no danger to 
the state in permitting, or even fostering, private 
industry within the limits suggested. As the organ- 
izer of the vast body of labor essential to the 
operation of the main productive and distributive 
fimctions of society, and to the other public services, 
the state would be able to, set the standard of living, 
alike with regard to income and leisure, which pri- 
vate industry would be compelled, by competitive 
force, to observe. The regulation of production, 
too, would be possible, and as a result the crises 
arising from glutted markets would disappear. 
Finally, in the control of all the functions of credit, 
the state would effectually prevent the exploitation 



224 SOCIALISM 

of the mass of the people through financial agencies, 
which is perhaps the greatest evil of our present 
social system. 

The application of the principles of democracy 
to the organization and administration of these 
great economic services of production, exchange, 
and credit is a problem full of alluring possibilities 
of speculation. "This that they call the Organiza- 
tion of Labor," said Carlyle, "is the Universal 
Vital Problem of the World." It is the great cen- 
tral problem of the socialization of industry and 
the state, before which all other problems pale into 
insignificance. It is comparatively easy to picture 
an ideal political democracy, and the main structural 
economic organization of the Socialist regime, with 
its private and public functions more or less clearly 
defined, is not very difficult of conception. These 
are foreshadowed with varying degrees of distinct- 
ness in present society, and the light of experience 
illumines the pathway before us. It is when we come 
to the question of the spirit of the economic organi- 
zation of the future, the methods of direction and 
management, that the light fails and we must grope 
our way into the great unknown with imagination 
and our sense of justice for guides. 

Most Socialist writers who have attempted to deal 
with this subject have simply regarded the state as 
the greatest employer of labor, carrying on its busi- 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 225 

ness upon methods not materially different from 
those adopted by the great industrial corporations 
of to-day. Boards of experts, chosen by civil ser- 
vice methods, directing all the economic activities 
of the state, such is their general conception of the 
industrial democracy of the Socialist regime. They 
believe, in other words, that the methods now em- 
ployed by the capitalist state, and by individuals 
within the capitalist state, would simply be extended 
under the Socialist regime. If this be so, a psycho- 
logical anomaly appears in the practical abandon- 
ment of the claim that, as a result of the class con- 
flict in society, the public ownership evolved within 
the capitalist state is essentially inferior to the pub- 
lic ownership of the Socialist ideal. It is perfectly 
clear that if the industrial organization under Social- 
ism is to be such that the workers employed in any 
industry have no more voice in its management than 
the postal employees in this country have at the 
present time, it cannot be otherwise than absurd 
to speak of it as an industrial democracy. 

Here, in truth, lies the crux of the greatest prob- 
lem of all. We must face the fact that, in anything 
worthy of the name of an industrial democracy, the 
terms and conditions of employment cannot be 
decided wholly without regard to the will of the 
workers themselves on the one hand, nor, on the 
other hand, by the workers alone without reference 



226 SOCIALISM 

to the general body of the citizenry. If the former 
method fails to satisfy the requirements of democ- 
racy by ignoring the will of the workers in the organi- 
zation of industry, the alternative method involves 
a hierarchical government, equally incompatible 
with democracy. Some way must be found by 
which the industrial government of society, the 
organization of production and distribution, may be 
securely based upon the dual basis of common civic 
rights and the rights of the workers in their special 
relations as such. 

In actual practice to-day, in those industries in 
which the organization of the workers into unions 
has been most successful, the workers, through their 
organizations, do exercise a certain amount of con- 
trol over the conditions of their employment. They 
make trade agreements, for instance, in which such 
matters as wages, hours of labor, apprenticeship, 
output, engagement and discharge of workers, and 
numerous other matters of a like nature, are made 
subject to the joint control of the employers and the 
workers. Of course, this share in the control of the 
industry in which they are employed is a right 
enjoyed only as the fruit of conquest, won by war 
and maintained only by ceaseless vigilance and armed 
strength. It is not inconceivable, however, that in 
the Socialist state there might be a frank extension 
of this principle. The workers in the main groups 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 227 

of industries might form autonomous organizations 
for the administration of their special interests, 
subject only to certain fundamental laws of society 
and its government. Thus, the trades unions would 
become administrative politico-economic organiza- 
tions, after the manner of the mediaeval guilds, in- 
stead of mere agencies of class warfare as at present. 
The economic organization of the Socialist state 
would consist, then, of three distinct forms, as fol- 
lows: (1) Private production and exchange, subject 
only to such general supervision and control by the 
state as the interests of society demand, such as 
protection against monopolization, sanitary laws, 
and the like; (2) voluntary cooperation, subject to 
similar supervision and control; (3) production and 
exchange by the state, the administration to be by 
the autonomous organizations of the workers in 
industrial groups, subject to the fundamental laws 
and government of society as a whole. 

V 

Two other functions of the economic organization 
of society remain to be considered, the distribution of 
labor and its remuneration. In the organization 
of industry society will have to achieve a twofold 
result, a maximum of general, social efficiency, on 
the one hand, and of personal liberty and comfort 
to the workers on the other. The state would not 



228 SOCIALISM 

only guarantee the right to labor, but, as a corol- 
lary, it would impose the duty of labor upon every 
competent person. The Pauline injunction, "If 
any man will not work, neither shall he eat," would 
be applied in the Socialist state to all except the 
incompetent to labor. The immature child, the 
aged, the sick and infirm members of society, would 
alone be exempted from labor. The result of this 
would be that instead of a large unemployed army, 
vainly seeking the right to work, on the one hand, 
accompanied by the excessive overwork of the great 
mass of the workers fortunate enough to be em- 
ployed, a vast increase in the number of producers 
from this one cause alone would make possible much 
greater leisure for the whole body of workers. Ben- 
jamin Franklin estimated that in his day four hours' 
labor from every adult male able to work would be 
more than sufficient to provide wealth enough for 
all human wants; and it is certain that, without 
resorting to any standards of Spartan simplicity, or 
denying luxury and beauty to any individual, Frank- 
lin's estimate could be easily realized with anything 
approaching a scientific organization of labor. 

Not only would the productive forces be enor- 
mously increased by the absorption of those workers 
who under the present system are unemployed, and 
those who do not labor or seek labor; in addition to 
these, there would be a tremendous transference of 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 229 

potential productive energy from occupations ren- 
dered obsolete and unnecessary by the socialization 
of society. Thus, there are to-day tens of thou- 
sands of lawyers, bankers, traders, middlemen, 
speculators, and others, whose functions, necessary 
to the capitalist system, would, in most cases, cease 
to have any value. They would be compelled be- 
cause of this to enter the producing class. The 
possibilities of the scientific organization of industry 
are almost unlimited. Every gain made by the state 
in the direction of economy of production would 
test the private enterprise existing and urge it on in 
the same direction. Likewise, every gain made by 
the private producers would test the social produc- 
tion and urge it onward. Whether socialized pro- 
duction extended its sphere, or remained confined 
to its minimum limitations, would depend upon the 
comparative success or failure resulting. The state 
would not be able to arbitrarily extend its functions. 
The decision would rest with the people, who would, 
naturally, resort to social effort wherever it demon- 
strated its ability to perform any function more 
efficiently than private enterprise, with greater 
advantages of comfort and liberty to the community 
and to the individual. 

While in the Socialist regime labor would be 
compulsory, it is inconceivable that a free people 
would tolerate a bureaucratic rule assigning to each 



230 SOCIALISM 

individual his or her proper task, no matter how 
ingenious the system of assignment might be. Just 
as it is necessary to insist that all must be secured 
in their right to labor, and required to labor, it is 
necessary also that the choice of one's occupation 
should be as far as possible personal and free, sub- 
ject only to the laws of supply and demand. The 
greatest amount of personal freedom compatible 
with the requisite efficiency would be secured to the 
workers in their chosen occupations through their 
craft organizations. 

But, it will be objected, all occupations are not 
equally desirable. There are certain forms of work 
which, disagreeable in themselves, are just as essen- 
tial to the well-being of society as the most artistic 
and pleasing. Who will do the dirty work, the 
hard work, the dangerous work, under Socialism? 
Will these occupations also be left to choice, and, 
if so, will there not be an insurmountable difficulty 
arising from the natural reluctance of men to choose 
such work? 

VI 

In affirming the principle of free choice the Social- 
ist is called upon to show that the absence of com- 
pulsion would not involve the neglect of these dis- 
agreeable, but highly important, social services; 
that it would be compatible with social safety to 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 231 

leave them to personal choice. In the first place, 
much of this kind of work that is now performed 
by human labor could be more efficiently done by 
mechanical means. Much of the work done by 
sweated women and children in our cities is in fact 
done in competition with machines. Machinery 
has been invented, and is now available, to do thou- 
sands of the disagreeable and hurtful things now 
being done by human beings. Professor Franklin 
H. Giddings is perfectly right when he says: " Mod- 
ern civilization does not require, it does not need, 
the drudgery of needlewomen or the crushing toil 
of men in a score of life-destroying occupations. 
If these wretched beings should drop out of exis- 
tence and no others take their places, the economic 
activities of the world would not greatly suffer. A 
thousand devices latent in inventive brains would 
quickly make good any momentary loss." 1 

When, in England, a law was passed forbidding 
the practice of forcing little boys through chimneys, 
to clean them, chimneys did not cease to be swept. 
Other, less disagreeable and less dangerous, means 
were quickly invented. When the woolen manu- 
facturers were prevented from employing little boys 
and girls, they invented the piecing machine. 2 Thou- 

1 "Ethics of Social Progress," by Professor Franklin H. Giddings 
in Philanthropy and Social Progress (1893), page 226. 

2 "The Economics of Factory Legislation," in The Case for the 
Factory Acts, edited by Mrs. Sidney Webb, page 50. 



232 SOCIALISM 

sands of instances might be compiled to support 
the contention of Professor Giddings, equally as 
pertinent as these. Another important point is 
that the amount of such disagreeable and danger- 
ous work to be done would be very much less than 
now. That would certainly result from the scien- 
tific organization of industry. I suspect that, if 
the subject could be properly investigated, it could 
be shown that the amount of such labor involved 
in wasteful and unnecessary advertising alone is 
enormous. 

Still, with all possible reduction of the quantity 
of such work to be done, and with all the mechanical 
genius possible, it may be freely conceded that there 
would be some work quite dangerous, altogether 
disagreeable and repellent, and a great difference in 
the degree of attractiveness in some occupations as 
compared with others. But an occupation repel- 
lent in itself might be made attractive, if the hours 
of labor were relatively few as compared with other 
occupations. If six hours be regarded as the normal 
working day, it is quite easy to believe that, for 
sake of the larger leisure, with its opportunities 
for the pursuit of special interests, many a man 
would gladly accept a disagreeable position for three 
hours a day. The same holds true of superior re- 
muneration. Under the Socialist regime, just as 
to-day, many a man would gladly exchange his work 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 233 

for less pleasant work, if the remuneration offered 
were higher. To the old Utopian ideas of absolute 
equality and uniformity these methods would be 
fatal, but they are not at all incompatible with 
modern, scientific Socialism. Finally, we must not 
forget that there is a natural inequality of talent, 
of power. In any state of society most men will 
prefer to do the things they are best fitted for, the 
things they can do easiest and best. And the man 
who feels himself best fitted to be a hewer of wood 
or drawer of water will choose that rather than some 
loftier task. There is no reason at all to suppose 
that leaving the choice of occupation to the individ- 
ual would involve the slightest risk to society. 

That equality of remuneration is not an essential 
condition of the Socialist regime, we have already 
seen. It may be freely admitted, however, that 
the ideal to be aimed at, ultimately, must be approx- 
imate equality of income. Otherwise, class forma- 
tions must take place and the old problems incidental 
to economic inequality reappear. With such an 
industrial democracy as I have suggested as being 
essential to the Socialist state, there is little doubt 
that this result would be gradually attained. Let 
us consider briefly now the method of the remunera- 
tion of labor. 

Socialists are too often judged by their shibboleths 
rather than by the principles which those shibbo- 



234 SOCIALISM 

leths imperfectly express, or seek to express. De- 
claiming, rightly, against the wages system as a form 
of slave labor, the " abolition of wage slavery" 
forever inscribed on their banners, the average man 
is forced to the conclusion that the Socialists are 
working for a system in which the workers will divide 
their actual products and then barter the surplus 
for the surplus products of other workers. Either 
that, or the most rigid system of governmental 
production and a method of distributing rations 
and uniforms similar to that which obtains in the 
military organization of present-clay governments. 
It is easily seen, however, that such plans do not, 
on the one hand, conform to the democratic ideal of 
the Socialists, nor would either of them, on the other 
hand, be compatible with the wide personal liberty 
herein put forward as characteristic of the Socialist 
state. 

The earlier Utopian Socialists did propose to do 
away with wages; in fact, they proposed to abolish 
money altogether, and invented various forms of 
" Labor Notes" as a means of giving equality of 
remuneration for given quantities of labor, and 
providing a medium for the exchange of wealth. 
But when the Socialists of to-day speak of the "abo- 
lition of wages," or of the wages system, they use 
the words in the same sense as they speak of the 
abolition of capital; they would abolish only the social 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 235 

relations implied in the terms. Just as they do not 
mean by the abolition of capital the destruction of 
the machinery and implements of production, but 
the social relation in which they are used to create 
profit for the few ; so, when they speak of the aboli- 
tion of the wages system, they mean only the use 
of wages to exploit the producers for the gain of the 
owners of the means of production and exchange. 
Though the name "wages" might not be changed, a 
money payment for labor in a democratic arrange- 
ment of industry, representing an approximation 
to the full value of the labor, minus only its share 
of the cost of maintaining the social services, and 
the weaker, dependent members of society, is vastly 
different from a money payment for labor by one 
individual to other individuals, representing an 
approximation to their cost of living, bearing no 
relation to the value of the labor products, and paid 
in lieu of those products with a view to the gathering 
of a rich surplus by the payer. 

Karl Kautsky, perhaps the greatest living ex- 
ponent of the theories of modern Socialism, has made 
this point perfectly clear. He accepts without 
reserve the belief that wages, unequal and paid in 
money, will be the method of remuneration for labor 
in the Socialist regime. When too many laborers 
rush into certain branches of industry, the natural way 
to lessen their number and to increase the number 



236 SOCIALISM 

of laborers in other branches where there is need 
for them, will be to reduce wages in the one and to 
increase them in the other. Socialism, instead of being 
defined as an attempt to make men equal, might per- 
haps be more justly and accurately defined as a social 
system based upon the natural inequalities of man- 
kind. Not human equality, but equality of oppor- 
tunity to prevent the creation of artificial inequalities 
by privilege is the essence of Socialism. 

What, it may be asked, will society do to prevent 
the hoarding of wealth on the one hand, and the 
exploitation of the spendthrift by the abstinent? 
Here, as throughout this discussion, we must be care- 
ful to avoid the appearance of laying down dogmatic 
rules, giving categorical replies to questions which 
the future will answer in its own way. At best we 
can only speculate as to what possible answers to 
such questions are compatible with the fundamental 
principles of Socialism. Thus we may safely answer 
that in the Socialist regime society will not attempt 
to dictate to the individual how he shall spend his 
income. If Jones prefers objects oVart and Smith 
prefers fast horses or a steam yacht, each will be 
free to follow his inclinations so far as his resources 
will permit. If, on the contrary, one should prefer 
to hoard his wealth, he would be free to do so. The 
inheritance of such accumulated property would, 
however, necessarily be denied, society being the 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 237 

only possible inheritor of property. In this way, full 
play for individual liberty would be coupled with full 
security for society. There would be no danger of a 
ruling class as a result of natural inequalities. 

With such conditions as these, it is not difficult 
to suppose that the tendency to hoard wealth would 
largely disappear. In the same way, we must re- 
gard the possibilities of the exploitation of man by 
man developing in the Socialist state, through the 
wastefulness and improvidence of the one and the 
frugality, abstinence, and cunning of the other, as 
slight. With the credit functions entirely in the 
hands of the state, the improvident man would be 
able to obtain credit upon the same securities as 
from a private creditor, without undue exploitation. 
Society would further secure itself against the weak- 
ness and failure of the improvident by insuring all its 
members against sickness, accident, and old age. 

VII 

The administration of justice is necessarily a social 
function in a democratic society. All juridical func- 
tions should be socialized in the strict sense of being 
maintained at the social expense for the free service 
of the citizens. Court fees, advocates' charges, 
and other like expenses incidental to the admin- 
istration of justice in present society, are all anti- 
democratic and subversive of justice. 



238 SOCIALISM 

Finally, education is likewise a social necessity 
which society itself must assume responsibility for. 
We have discovered that for self-protection society 
must insist upon a certain minimum of education 
for every child able to receive it; that it is too vital 
a matter to be left to the option of parents or the 
desires of the immature child. We have made a 
certain minimum of education compulsory and free; 
the Socialist state would make a minimum — prob- 
ably larger than our present minimum — compul- 
sory, but it would also make all education free. 
From the first stages, in the kindergartens, to the 
last, in the universities, education must be wholly 
free. So long as a single bar exists to prevent any 
child from receiving all the education it is capable of 
profiting by, democracy is unattained. 

Whether the Socialist regime could tolerate the 
existence of elementary schools other than its own, 
such as privately conducted kindergartens and 
schools, religious schools, and so on, is questionable. 
Probably not. It would probably not content itself 
with refusing to permit religious doctrines or ideas 
to be taught in its schools, but would go further, 
and, as the natural protector of the child, guard its 
independence of thought in later life as far as pos- 
sible by forbidding religious teaching of any kind 
in schools for children up to a certain age. Beyond 
that age, religious education, in all other than the 



OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE 239 

public schools, would be freely permitted. This 
restriction of religious education to the years of 
judgment and discretion implies no hostility to reli- 
gion on the part of the state, but neutrality. Not 
the least important of the rights of the child is the 
right to be protected from influences which bias the 
mind and destroy the possibilities of independent 
judgment in later life, or make it attainable only as 
a result of bitter, needless, tragic experience. 

In this brief suggested outline of the Socialist 
state, the ami has been to show that the Socialist ideal 
is far from being the network of laws commonly 
imagined, or the mechanical arrangement of human 
relations devised by Utopian romancers. If the 
Socialist propaganda of to-day largely consists of 
the advocacy of laws, it must be remembered that 
these are to ameliorate conditions in the existing social 
system. The Socialist ideal of the state of the future 
is not a life completely enmeshed in a network of 
government, but a life controlled by government as 
little as possible — a maximum of personal freedom 
with a minimum of restraint. 

" These things shall be ! A loftier race 
Than e'er the world hath known shall rise 
With flower of freedom in their souls 
And light of science in their eyes." x 

1 J. Addington Symonds. 



APPENDIX 

NATIONAL PLATFORM OF THE SOCIALfST 
PARTY OF AMERICA 

ADOPTED BY THE CHICAGO CONVENTION, MAY 8, 1904 
I 

The Socialist Party, in convention assembled, 
makes its appeal to the American people as the de- 
fender and preserver of the idea of liberty and self- 
government in which the nation was born; as the 
only political movement standing for the programme 
and principles by which the liberty of the individual 
may become a fact; as the only political organiza- 
tion that is democratic, and that has for its purpose 
the democratizing of the whole of society. 

To this idea of liberty the Republican and Demo- 
cratic parties are equally false. They alike struggle 
for power to maintain and profit by an industrial 
system which can be preserved only by the complete 
overthrow of such liberties as we already have, and 
by the still further enslavement and degradation of 

labor. 

r 241 



242 SOCIALISM 

Our American institutions came into the world in 
the name of freedom. They have been seized upon 
by the capitalist class as the means of rooting out 
the idea of freedom from among the people. Our 
state and national legislatures have become the mere 
agencies of great propertied interests. These in- 
terests control the appointments and decisions of 
the judges of our courts. They have come into what 
is practically a private ownership of all the functions 
and forces of government. They are using these to 
betray and conquer foreign and weaker peoples, in 
order to establish new markets for the surplus goods 
which the people make, but are too poor to buy. 
They are gradually so invading and restricting the 
right of suffrage as to take away unawares the right 
of the worker to a vote or voice in public affairs. By 
enacting new and misinterpreting old laws, they are 
preparing to attack the liberty of the individual even 
to speak or think for himself, or for the common good. 

By controlling all the sources of social revenue, the 
possessing class is able to silence what might be the 
voice of protest against the passing of liberty and 
the coming of tyranny. It completely controls the 
university and public school, the pulpit and the press, 
and the arts and literatures. By making these eco- 
nomically dependent upon itself, it has brought all 
the forms of public teaching into servile submission 
to its own interests. 



THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA 243 

Our political institutions are also being used as 
the destroyers of that individual property upon which 
all liberty and opportunity depend. The promise 
of economic independence to each man was one of 
the faiths upon which our institutions were founded. 
But, under the guise of defending private property, 
capitalism is using our political institutions to make 
it impossible for the vast majority of human beings 
ever to become possessors of private property in the 
means of life. 

Capitalism is the enemy and destroyer of essential 
private property. Its development is through the 
legalized confiscation of all that the labor of the work- 
ing class produces, above its subsistence-wage. The 
private ownership of the means of employment 
grounds society in an economic slavery which ren- 
ders intellectual and political tyranny inevitable. 

Socialism comes so to organize industry and society 
that every individual shall be secure in that private 
property in the means of life upon which his liberty 
of being, thought, and action depends. It comes to 
rescue the people from the fast-increasing and suc- 
cessful assault of capitalism upon the liberty of the 
individual. 

II 

As an American Socialist Party, we pledge our 
fidelity to the principles of international Socialism, 



244 SOCIALISM 

as embodied in the united thought and action of 
the Socialists of all nations. In the industrial de- 
velopment already accomplished, the interests of 
the world's workers are separated by no national 
boundaries. The condition of the most exploited 
and oppressed workers, in the most remote places of 
the earth, inevitably tends to drag down all the 
workers of the world to the same level. The tendency 
of the competitive wage system is to make labor's 
lowest condition the measure or rule of its universal 
condition. Industry and finance are no longer 
national but international, in both organization and 
results. The chief significance of national boundaries, 
and of the so-called patriotisms which the ruling 
class of each nation is seeking to revive, is the power 
which these give to capitalism to keep the workers 
of the world from uniting, and to throw them against 
each other in the struggles of contending capitalist 
interests for the control of the yet unexploited 
markets of the world, or the remaining sources of 
profit. 

The Socialist movement, therefore, is a world- 
movement. It knows of no conflicts of interests 
between the workers of one nation and the workers 
of another. It stands for the freedom of the workers 
of all nations; and, in so standing, it makes for the 
full freedom of all humanity. 



THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA 245 

III 

The Socialist movement owes its birth and growth 
to that economic development or world-process 
which is rapidly separating a working or producing 
class from a possessing or capitalist class. The class 
that produces nothing possesses labor's fruits, and 
the opportunities and enjoyments these fruits afford, 
while the class that does the world's real work has 
increasing economic uncertainty, and physical and 
intellectual misery, for its portion. 

The fact that these two classes have not yet become 
fully conscious of their distinction from each other, 
the fact that the lines of division and interest may 
not yet be clearly drawn, does not change the fact 
of the class conflict. 

This class struggle is due to the private ownership 
of the means of employment, or the tools of pro- 
duction. Wherever and whenever man owned his 
own land and tools, and by them produced only the 
things which he used, economic independence was 
possible. But production, or the making of goods, 
has long ceased to be individual. The labor of scores, 
or even thousands, enters into almost every article 
produced. Production is now social or collective. 
Practically everything is made or done by many 
men — sometimes separated by seas or continents 
— working together for the same end. But this 



246 SOCIALISM 

cooperation in production is not for the direct use of 
the things made by the workers who make them, 
but for the profit of the owners of the tools and means 
of production ; and to this is due the present division 
of society into two classes ; and from it have sprung 
all the miseries, inharmonies, and contradictions of 
our civilization. 

Between these two classes there can be no possible 
compromise or identity of interests, any more than 
there can be peace in the midst of war, or light in the 
midst of darkness. A society based upon this class 
division carries in itself the seeds of its own destruc- 
tion. Such a society is founded in fundamental in- 
justice. There can be no possible basis for social 
peace, for individual freedom, for mental and moral 
harmony, except in the conscious and complete 
triumph of the working class as the only class that 
has the right or power to be. 

IV 

The Socialist programme is not a theory imposed 
upon society for its acceptance or rejection. It is but 
the interpretation of what is, sooner or later, inevitable. 
Capitalism is already struggling to its destruction. 
It is no longer competent to organize or administer 
the work of the world, or even to preserve itself. 
The captains of industry are appalled at their own 
inability to control or direct the rapidly socializing 



THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA 247 

forces of industry. The so-called trust is but a sign 
and form of the developing socialization of the world's 
work. The universal increase of the uncertainty of 
employment, the universal capitalist determination 
to break down the unity of labor in the trades unions, 
the widespread apprehensions of impending change, 
reveal that the institutions of capitalist society are 
passing under the power of inhering forces that will 
soon destroy them. 

Into the midst of the strain and crisis of civiliza- 
tion, the Socialist movement comes as the only con- 
servative force. If the world is to be saved from 
chaos, from universal disorder and misery, it must 
be by the union of the workers of all nations in the 
Socialist movement. The Socialist Party comes with 
the only proposition or programme for intelligently 
and deliberately organizing the nation for the common 
good of all its citizens. It is the first time that the 
mind of man has ever been directed toward the con- 
scious organization of society. 

Socialism means that all those things upon which 
the people in common depend shall by the people in 
common be owned and administered. It means that 
the tools of employment shall belong to their creators 
and users; that all production shall be for the direct 
use of the producers ; that the making of goods for 
profit shall come to an end ; that we shall all be 
workers together ; and that all opportunities shall 
be open and equal to all men. 



248 SOCIALISM 



To the end that the workers may seize every pos- 
sible advantage that may strengthen them to gain 
complete control of the powers of government, and 
thereby the sooner establish the cooperative com- 
monwealth, the Socialist Party pledges itself to watch 
and work, in both the economic and the political 
struggle, for each successive immediate interest of 
the working class ; for shortened days of labor and 
increases of wages ; for the insurance of the workers 
against accident, sickness, and lack of employment; 
for pensions for aged and exhausted workers; for 
the public ownership of the means of transportation, 
communication, and exchange; for the graduated 
taxation of incomes, inheritances, franchises, and 
land values, the proceeds to be applied to the public 
employment and improvement of the conditions of 
the workers; for the complete education of children, 
and their freedom from the workshop ; for the pre- 
vention of the use of the military against labor in 
the settlement of strikes ; for the free administration 
of justice ; for popular government, including in- 
itiative, referendum, proportional representation, 
equal suffrage of men and women, municipal home 
rule, and the recall of officers by their constituents; 
and for every gain or advantage for the workers that 
may be wrested from the capitalist system, and that 



THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA 249 

may relieve the suffering and strengthen the hands 
of labor. We lay upon every man elected to any 
executive or legislative office the first duty of striv- 
ing to procure whatever is for the workers' most 
immediate interest, and for whatever will lessen the 
economic and political powers of the capitalist, and 
increase the like powers of the worker. 

But, in so doing, we are using these remedial 
measures as means to the one great end, of the co- 
operative commonwealth. Such measures of relief 
as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a 
preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers 
of government, in order that they may thereby lay 
hold of the whole system of industry, and thus come 
into their rightful inheritance. 

To this end we pledge ourselves, as the party of 
the working class, to use all political power, as fast 
as it shall be intrusted to us by our fellow-workers, 
both for their immediate interests and for their 
ultimate and complete emancipation. To this end 
we appeal to all the workers of America, and to all 
who will lend their lives to the service of the workers 
in their struggle to gain their own, and to all who will 
nobly and disinterestedly give their days and ener- 
gies unto the workers' cause, to cast in their lot and 
faith with the Socialist Party. Our appeal for the 
trust and suffrages of our fellow-workers is at once 
an appeal for their common good and freedom, and 



250 SOCIALISM 

for the freedom and blossoming of our common hu- 
manity. In pledging ourselves, and those we repre- 
sent, to be faithful to the appeal which we make, 
we believe that we are but preparing the soil of that 
economic freedom from which will spring the free- 
dom of the whole man. 



INDEX 



Abbe" Lancellotti, quoted, 26. 

A Contribution to the Critique of 
Political Economy, 77, 162, 166, 
171, 190. 

Adams, Brooks, 128. 

Africa : American investments 
in, 101 ; cannibalism in, 67 ; 
Moors in, 79 ; slavery in, 24. 

Agriculture, concentration in, 103, 
108-112, 121. 

Aix-la-Chapelle, conference of 
sovereigns at, 44-45. 

A Lecture on Human Happi- 
ness, 165. 

"Alfred" (Samuel Kydd) quoted, 
21. 

Amalgamated Association of Iron 
and Steel Yv^orkers, 156. 

Amalgamated Society of Railway 
Servants, 157-158. 

America : class divisions and 
struggles in, 139-146; discov- 
ery of, 78-80 ; first cotton from 
used in England, 29; foreign 
capital invested in, 101. See 
also United States. 

American Farmer, The, 110, 111. 

American Federationist, The, 11 n. 

American Federation of Labor, 
the, 145. 

American Revolution, the, 68. 

A Modest Inquiry into the Nature 
and Necessity of a Paper Cur- 
rency, 190 n. 

Anarchism : Socialism and, 1 ; 
Socialism opposed to, 144. 

Anaximander, 181. 

Ancient Society, 86 n. 

An Inquiry Concerning Political 
Justice, 164. 



An Inquiry into the Principles of 
the Distribution of Wealth, 164. 

Anstey, Mr., satire on the Socialist 
regime, 212. 

Anthracite coal strike of 1903, 
the, 138. 

Aristotle, 70, 87. 

Arkwright, English inventor, 17. 

Asia : American capital invested 
in, 101 ; savages in Central, 79 ; 
supposed origin of feudalism 
in, 90. 

Athens, 88. 

A Treatise on Taxes and Consti- 
tutions, 32 n. 

Australia, American capital in- 
vested in, 101. 

Austrian Labor Almanac, the, 
57 n. 

"Austrian School" of economists, 
the, 198. 

Aveling, Edward, 77 n., 169 n. ; 
Eleanor Marx, 169 n. 



Bachofen, 85. 

Baden, concentration of wealth 

in, 116. 
Bakunin, Michael, 57. 
Bantu tribes of Africa, 86. 
Bax, E. Belfort, 53 n., 58 n., 77n. 
Beaulieu, Leroy, 116. 
Bellamy, Edward, 7. 
Bernstein, Edward, 114, 164. 
Bigelow, Melville, M., 128 n. 
Blanc, Louis, 9. 
Bookstaver, Justice, 156. 
Bray, John Francis, 163, 166, 173. 
Brisbane, Albert, 48. 
British Museum, Marx and the, 

169-170. 



251 



252 



INDEX 



Brook Farm, 46. 

Buffalo Express strike, 156. 

"Bull pens," 159. 



Cabet, Etienne, 47, 50-52, 180. 

California, cost of raising wheat 
in, 108 n. 

Campanella, 7. 

Cannabalism, 67, 86-87. 

Capital: dedication of, 167; 
English character of, 172; 
Liebknecht on, 168-169; not 
the cause, but the explanation 
of Socialism, 102; quoted, 26- 
27, 77, 99, 183, 185. 

Capital, : nature of, 183, 184; So- 
cialists advocate abolition of, 
234-235. 

Capitalist income, the source of, 
203-210. 

Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 175, 224. 

Cartwright, English inventor, 17- 
18. 

Cassalis, African missionary, 
quoted, 66. 

Centralization and the Law : Scien- 
tific Legal Education, 128. 

Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, 
A Comparison, 77. 

Chartism and Chartists, 46, 58, 
59, 203. 

Child Labor in England, 19-25, 
37. 

Civil War, the, 73. 

Claims of Labour and Capital 
Conciliated, The, 165. 

Clansman, The, 129. 

Clarion, The, 5 n. 

Class consciousness, 142-143. 

Class Divisions : of capitalism, 
97,129-134; of feudalism, 127- 
129; of slavery, 127-134; the 
United States, 139-146, 152- 
158; ultimate end of all, 126, 
160. 

Class environment, influence on 
beliefs, etc., 134-139. 



Class struggle theory, the, 123- 
126. 

Clodd, Edward, quoted, 66, 70. 

Coeur de Alene, 146, 154. 

Colorado, labor troubles in, 138, 
154. 

Columbus and the discovery of 
America, 78-80. 

Coming Slavery, The, 4, 213. 

Commercial crisis in England, 
1815, 34-39. 

Commodity : definition of a, 
184-187; money as a, 196- 
200 ; labor-power as a, 200-202 ; 
sunshine called a, 186; value 
of, determined by labor, 187- 
196. 

Communism : political, 11, 12, 47, 
52-54; primitive, 81, 85-86. 

Communist League, the, 53. 

Communist Manifesto, the : 
Birth-cry of modern Socialism, 
46 ; joint authorship of 54, 61- 
62 ; publication of, 54 ; quoted, 
11, 60, 125-126; summary of, 
by Engels, 60-61 ; taxation 
of land values advocated in, 
210. 

Competition, 82-85, 98, 99, 120- 
121. 

Comrade, The, 8. 

Concentration of capital and 
wealth, the, 100-122. 

Condition of the Working Class in 
England in 1844, The, 58, 62. 

Cooke-Taylor, R. W., 21. 

Cooperation : among animals, 
82-84; Robert Owen and, 41, 
47; under Socialism, 222, 227. 

Corn Law Rhymes, the, 1. 

Cossa, Luigi, quoted, 174. 

Cotton manufacture in England, 
18 et seq. ; Friedrich Engels 
and, 57-58. 

Credit functions in Socialist re- 
gime, 222, 223-224, 237. 

Cripple Creek, 146. 

Crompton, English inventor, 17. 

Currency and Wealth, 102. 



253 



Dale, David, 22. 

Darwin, Charles : appreciation of 
work of, by Marx and his asso- 
ciates, 77; compared to Marx, 
77; letter from, to Marx, 77; 
quoted, 82. 

Davenay, letter from Herbert 
Spencer to, 4. 

Dawson, W. H., 55 n. 

Debs, Eugene V., 155. 

Democracy : application of prin- 
ciples of, to industry under 
Socialism, 224-227 ; essential to 
Socialism, 215 ; only approxi- 
mately attainable, 215-216; 
Socialists' advocacy of, 216. 

Descent of Man, The, 82. 

Deville, Gabriel, quoted, 184. 

Diary of Mrs. Marx, quoted, 170- 
171. 

Die Voraussetzungen des Social- 
izmus, 114. 

Direct legislation, 216. 

Directory of Directors, the, 100. 

Disclosures About the Commu- 
nists' Process, 54 n. 

Drinkwater, partner of Robert 
Owen, 28-29. 

E 

Eastern Question, The, 169 n. 

Economics of Socialism, 36, 81 n., 
198 n. 

Effects of Civilisation on the People 
of the European States, 163. 

Elements of Political Economy 
(Nicholson), 186 n. 

Elliott, Ebenezer, quoted, 1. 

Ely, Professor R. T., quoted, 68, 
99, 113, 116, 119. 

Engels, Friedrich : birth and 
early training, 57 ; collabo- 
rates with Marx in authorship 
of Communist Manifesto, 54; 
first meeting with Marx, 55, 57, 
58; friendship with O'Connor 



and Owen, 58 ; his Condition of 
the Working Class in England, 
58; joins International Alliance 
with Marx, 53 ; life in England, 
57-58; linguistic abilities, 58; 
journalistic work, 58 ; poem on, 
63; quoted, 14, 15, 42, 43, 47, 
60, 62, 75-76, 77, 89, 125, 148; 
share in authorship of Mani- 
festo, 61-62. 

Essai sur la repartition des ri- 
chesses et sur la tendance a une 
moindre ine'galite des condi- 
tions, 116. 

Essays on the Formation of Hu- 
man Character, 52. 

Everet's wool-dressing machine, 
25. 



Factory System and the Factory 
Acts, The, 21 n. 

Farmers, conflicting class in- 
terests of, 132-133. 

Ferdinand and Isabella, 79. 

Ferri, Enrico, 65 n., 67. 

Feudalism : duration of, 91 ; 
nature of, 92-94; origin of, 90, 
91 ; theory of, 92. 

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 74. 

Feuerbach, the Roots of the Social- 
ist Philosophy, 74 n. 

Figaro, the, 4. 

"Final Utility" theory of value, 
198. 

Fourier, Charles, 41, 44, 48, 180. 

Foxwell, Professor, 166 n. ; 
quoted, 165. 

Franklin, Benjamin, estimate of, 
by Marx, 190; quoted, 189-190. 

Freeman, Justice, 156. 

Freiligrath, F., 167. 

French and German Socialism, 42. 

G 

Garrison, W. Lloyd, 73. 
Garwood, John, poem by, quoted, 
33. 



254 



INDEX 



Gentz, M., 44-45. 

George, Henry, 210. 

German Socialism and Ferdinand 

Lassalle, 55 n. 
Germany : Anarchism weak in, 

144; ribbon loom invented in, 

26; use of loom in forbidden, 

26. 
Ghent, W. J., 31, 71, 134 n. ; 

quoted, 138, 139, 140. 
Gibbins, H. de B., quoted, 19-20, 

24, 25. 
Giddings, Professor Franklin H., 

quoted, 231. 
Giffen, Sir Robert, 118. 
Gildersleeve, Justice, 157. 
Glasgow, conference of cotton 

manufacturers in, 36-39. 
Godwin, William, 163, 164. 
Gompers, Samuel, quoted, 11 n. 
Gossen, 198 n. 
Gray, John, 163, 165. 
Green, John Richard, 68. 
Growth of Monopoly in English 

Industry, The, 105. 
Guaranties of Harmony and Free- 
dom, The, 48. 
Guide to the Study of Political 

Economy, Y74: n. 

H 

Hall, Charles, 163. 
Hanna, Marcus A., 145. 
Hargreaves, English inventor, 

17. 
Hazel ton and Homestead, 146. 
Heath, Frederic, 48 n. 
Heine, Heinrich, 57. 
Herr Vogt, 54 n. 
Hillquit, Morris, quoted, 48-50. 
History and Criticism of the 

Labour Theory of Value, 165 n. 
History of Socialism, 55 n. 
History of Socialism in the United 

States, 42, 48. 
History of the Factory System, 21. 
Hodgskin, Thomas, i63, 166, 173. 
Huxley, Professor, 66, 82. 



Hyndman, H. M., 36 n., 81 n., 
198 n. 



Ibsen, 13. 

Icaria, 51-52. 

Idaho, 154. 

Industrial History of England, pi, 

20, 24. 
Injunctions, 155-157. 
International Cigarmakers ' Union , 

156. 
International Socialist Review, The, 

8n. 
International Typographical 

Union, 156. 



Jevons, W. S., 199 n. 

Jones, Llovd, biographer of Owen, 

16. 
Jones, Owen's first partner, 28. 

K 

Karl Marx: Biographical Me- 
moirs, 55, 169, 171. 

Kautsky, Karl, 57 n„ 107,235; 
quoted, 108. 

Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 80. 

Kirkup, Thomas, 55 n. 

Kropotkin, Peter, 82, 83, 84. 



Labor-power, a commoditv 

202; determines value, 1S7- 
196. 

Labour Defended against tin 
Claims of Capital, 166. 

Labour's Wrongs and Labour'* 
Remedy, 166. 

Lamarck, 61. 

La Misere de la Philosophic, 161, 
163. 

Land, ownership of, under Social- 
ism, 221 ; under tribal com- 
munism, 125. 

La Philosophic de la Misere, 161. 



255 



Lassalle, Ferdinand, 55 n., 164 n., 

201. 
Lauderdale, Lord, 45, 198. 
Lectures on the Nature and Use of 

Money, 166. 
Lee, Algernon, quoted, 136, 203- 

205, 209. 
Leibnitz, quoted, 65-66. 
Leslie, John ("J. L.")> 63. 
Liebknecht, W., 55, 57; quoted, 

77, 168-169, 170-171. 
Life of Francis Place, The, 166 n. 
Lloyd, W. F., 198 n. 
Lockwood, George B., 37, 39, 40. 
London, Jack, 144 n. 
Lovejoy, 73. 
Lubbock, Sir John, 85. 
Luddites, the, 25. 
Luther, Martin, 68. 
LyeU, 66. 

M 

Machinery, introduction of, 17- 
18, 25-27. 

Machinists' Union sued, 158. 

Macrosty, H. W., 105. 

Maine, Sir Henry, 85. 

Malthus, 82. 

Marx, Eleanor, 55 n. 

Marx, Karl : Birth and early lif e, 
55-56 ; Capital written in Lon- 
don, 168-169 ; collaborates with 
Engels in authorship of Com- 
munist Manifesto, 54; conver- 
sion to Socialism, 58; corre- 
spondent for New York Tribune 
169; death, 55, 172; domestic 
felicity, 171-172; edits Rhenish 
Gazette, 56; expelled from dif- 
ferent European countries, 167- 
168; finds refuge in England, 
168 ; first meeting with Engels, 
55, 57, 58 ; his attack on Prou- 
dhon, 161-162; his obligations 
to the Bicardian Socialists, 163- 
164; his surplus-value theory, 
163, 164, 202, 203-206 ; in Ger- 
man revolution of 1848, 167; 



Jewish ancestry, 55-56; mar- 
riage, 57; mastery of art of 
definition, 176; poverty, 169- 
171; quoted, 26-27, 74, 99, 
153, 176, 183, 184-185, 190 n. ; 
related to Argyles by mar- 
riage, 57; scientific methods 
of, 179-181 ; starts New Rhen- 
ish Gazette, 167-168. 

Mass and Class, 71, 134 n., 139, 
142. 

Mayo-Smith, Richmond, 117-118. 

McMaster, 68. 

Mehring, Franz, 55 n. 

Menger, Dr. Anton, 163, 165 n., 
166 n., 199 n. 

Message to Congress, 141. 

Middle Ages, the, 91, 97. 

Mill, John Stuart, 175. 

Mitchell, John, quoted, 145-146. 
155. 

Moffett, Cleveland, 119 n. 

Money as a commodity, 196-198. 

More, Sir Thomas, 7, 51. 

Morgan, J. P., 142. 

Morgan, Lewis H., 85, 86 n. 

Morris, William, quoted, 5, 18. 

Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, 
83, 84. 

N 

National Association of Manu- 
facturers, the, 145. 

National Civic Federation, the, 
145. 

Natural and Artificial Right of 
Property Contrasted, The, 166. 

"New Christianity" of Saint-Si- 
mon, 58-59. 

New Harmony, 40-41, 46. 

New Harmony Communities, The, 
37, 39, 40. 

New Lanark, 30-34. 

New Moral World, The, 9, 58. 

Newton, 124. 

New York Sun, the, 156. 

Nicholson, Professor J. S., 186 n. 

Northern Star, The, 58. 



256 



Oceana, 71. 

Organized Labor, 146, 155. 

Origin of Species, The, 61. 

Origin of the Family, Private 
Property, and the State, The, 86, 
89. 

Our Benevolent Feudalism, 105. 

Owen, Robert : as cotton manu- 
facturer, 27 et seq. ; at Aix-la- 
Chapelle, 44 ; Autobiography of, 
22, 31, 45; becomes Socialist, 
39 ; begins agitation for Fac- 
tory Acts, 29 ; biography of, 16 ; 
dying words, 45 ; established 
infant schools, 30, 41 ; Engels' 
estimate of, 14-15 ; first to use 
word " Socialism, " 9 ; founder of 
cooperative movement, 41 ; his 
"failure," 41; improves spin- 
ning machinery, 28 n. ; Lieb- 
knecht on, 14; New Lanark, 
30-32; on crisis of 1815, 34-39 ; 
presides over first Trade Union 
Congress, 41 n. ; proposes es- 
tablishment of communistic 
villages, 39; quoted, 22, 23, 
31, 32-33, 33-34, 35-36, 37-39, 
45 ; skepticism of, 16 ; speech 
to cotton manufacturers, 37. 

Owenism synonymous with So- 
cialism, 9. 



Peel, Sir Robert, 29. 

Petty, Sir William, 173, 174, 175 ; 

quoted, 188-189. 
Pioneers of Evolution from Thales 

to Huxley, 66. 
Place, Francis, 166. 
Plato, 9. 

Political Economy (Senior), 173. 
Poverty of Philosophy, The, 161, 

163. 
Present Distribution of Wealth in 

the United States, The, 119. 
Price an approximation of value, 

196-200. 



Principles of Political Economy 

and Taxation, 191. 
Private property, origin of, 86 ; 

under the Socialist regime, 220, 

236. 
Proudhon, P. J., 57, 161, 162, 166. 

Q 

Quelch, H., 161 n. 

R 

Reformateurs Modernes, 9. 
Remarks and Facts relative to the 

American Paper Money, 190. 
Republic, the, of Plato, 9. 
Revolution and Counter-Revolu- 

tion, 169. 
Revolution in Mind and Practice, 

The, 45 n. 
Reybaud, L., 8, 9. 
Ricardians, the, 162, 163, 165, 

167, 193. 
Ricardo, David, 165, 173, 175, 

193; quoted, 190, 191. 
Right to the Whole Produce of 

Labour, The, 163, 165. 
Rockefeller, John D., 120, 142. 
Rogers, Thorold, 72, 78 n., 79 n., 

189 n., 192 n. 
Roosevelt, President, quoted, 141. 



Sadler, Michael, 23. 
Saint-Simon, 5, 7, 9, 41, 43, 44, 

180, 181. 
Salt, H. S., 24 n. 
Schiller, quoted, 73. 
Seligman, Professor E. R. S., 69, 

70, 72, 74, 75. 
Senior, Nassau, quoted, 173. 
Shall the Unions go into Politics f 

46 n. 
Simons, A. M., quoted, 110, 111. 
Smith, Adam, 165, 173, 174, 175, 

191, 192; quoted, 189, 196. 
Social Democracy Red Book, 48 n. 



257 



Socialism : Anarchism, and, 1, 
144; cooperation under, 222, 
227; credit functions under, 
222, 237; democracy essential 
to, 215-217; education under, 
238 ; first use of the word, 8-9 ; 
freedom in religious, scientific, 
and philosophical matters un- 
der, 217; freedom of the in- 
dividual under, 213, 217; in 
Germany, 144 ; in United States, 
3, 152 ; inheritance of wealth un- 
der, 236-237; justice under, 
237; labor and its reward un- 
der, 227-237; monopolies and, 
99, 100, 221, 223, 227 ; private 
property and industry under, 
220-221 ; relation of sexes un- 
der, 218-219; religious train- 
ing of children and, 238 ; scien- 
tific character of, 179-181 ; 
Utopian and scientific, com- 
pared, 42-43; wages under, 
234-236; wealth under, 236- 
237. 

Socialism and Modern Science, 65, 
67. 

Socialism and Social Democracy, 
8n. 

Socialism, Utopian and Scien- 
tific, 15, 34, 43, 44, 71. 

Social Revolution, The, 108. 

Sombart, Professor Werner, 109. 

Songs of Freedom, 24 n. 

Spahr, Charles B., 119. 

Spencer, Herbert, 6, 66, 213; 
quoted, 4, 5. 

Statistics and Economics, 117, 118. 

Studies in the Evolution of In- 
dustrial Society, 99, 113, 115, 
119. 

Surplus-value theory, the, 163, 
165, 202-210. 

Symonds, J. Addington, 239 n. 



"Taff Vale law" 157-158, 159. 
The Economic Interpretation of 

History (Rogers), 78, 79. 
The Economic Interpretation of 

History (Seligman), 69, 70, 72, 

73, 75. 
The People's Marx, 184. 
The Social System, a Treatise on 

the Principles of Exchange, 166. 
Thompson, William, 163, 164, 173. 
Tolstoy, 13. 

U 

United Mine Workers, the, 130. 

United States : classes in, 139- 
146 ; concentration of wealth in, 
119-120; farms and farm 
mortgages in, 110; million- 
aires in, 120; Socialism in, 3, 
152; strikes in, £44. 

United States Steel Corporation, 
113. 

W 

WaUace, A. R., 66, 70. 
War of the Classes, 144 n. 
Warne, Frank Julian, 130 n. 
Wealth of Nations, the, 172, 173, 

189, 192. 
Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 23. 
Weitling, Wilhelm, 47, 48, 50, 52. 
Whitaker, Dr. A. C, 165 n. 
Wolf, Wilhelm, 167. 
Worker, The, 136, 203, 209. 
World as it Is, and as it Might 

Be, The, 47. 



Z 



Zola, Emile, 13. 



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